Incident response plan: A must in the business armory.

Is your organization ready with an incident response plan to contain cyberattacks quickly? Whatever the size of your organization or whether cybercriminals have targeted you in the past or not, the threat of a debilitating cyberattack on your organization is always there. Therefore, while having a foolproof cybersecurity plan in place is ideal, it is also imperative to devise an incident response plan.

An Incident Response Plan is crucial to ensure business continuity

Comprising a set of information security policies and procedures, which can detect, respond, and eliminate cyberattacks, an Incident Response Plan helps reduce the scope of the attack and enhance recovery time by analyzing the cause of the security breach. This goes a long way in strengthening cybersecurity systems to counter future attacks.

 Steps to building a robust Incident Response Plan

While there are plenty of ways to identify threat indicators in real-time, Gartner, in a recent report, identified 3 key steps to building a successful Incident Response Plan.

• Develop a response

Developing a map for the response process should be the first and foremost step. The plan should be detailed and systematically represent the path of crisis response. Personnel in charge must coordinate, track, and communicate at every step.

• Define incident severity

Threats must be classified, segmented, and prioritized into various tiers for faster and easier identification. This will help smooth processing during future incident escalations, service-level contracts, and communication.

• Assign roles

Delivering an effective and efficient incident response - the onus lies on the organization's team. A RACI (Responsible - Accountable - Consulted- Informed) Chart must be created that designates roles and responsibilities across groups during an incident response. It should also be accessible and visible across the organization, with legal, C-suite, HR, and privacy teams as the stakeholders.

Constitution of the Incident Response Team

Incident response can only be effective through cross-functional skilling and the involvement of members across all levels of an organization. In line with this, security and business leaders insist on having the following members on the cybersecurity front:

• Security experts - They’ll oversee main operational and technical controls and aid and intervene directly with affected resources.
• Incident response administrators - These are responsible for the supervision and prioritization of discovery, control, and recovery of events. They must also implement rescue tactics in high-severity breaches to protect firms, regulations, Law enforcement, customers, and the public.
• Threat investigators - As the name suggests, they will offer intelligence and perspective on security breaches. Using third-party tools and the internet to identify potential current and future risks would be an integral part of their profile. Firms can explore in-house hiring or outsourcing.
• A contingency plan is a must-have for global businesses to protect their digital assets. As customers and stakeholders want to be associated with those businesses that are upfront and proactive about data privacy, they must equip themselves with the ability to recognize and respond to security threats in real-time. Therefore, enterprises devise an incident response to ensure business continuity and achieve their long-term business goals.