Building an Incident Response Plan Before You Need One
When systems are down and people are stressed, a short, rehearsed plan is worth more than a long document nobody has read.
Nobody makes good decisions in the first hour of a breach unless they have thought about it beforehand. An incident response plan gives your team roles, priorities and a script to follow when emotions are high.
Decide who does what
Name an incident lead, a technical lead, someone to handle communication with staff and customers, and a deputy for each. Include out-of-hours contact numbers.
Know your critical systems
List the systems the business cannot operate without, who owns them and how they are restored. This tells you what to protect first and what can wait.
Keep the steps simple
- Detect and confirm what is happening.
- Contain: isolate affected devices and accounts.
- Preserve evidence before wiping anything.
- Eradicate the cause and recover from clean backups.
- Review what happened and update the plan.
Practise it
A one-hour tabletop exercise, where the team talks through a made-up incident, will expose gaps in contact lists, access and decision-making more cheaply than a real breach ever could.
