Emerging technologies such as cloud, IoT, AI, and blockchain can bring many benefits to your organization, but they also pose new challenges and risks when it comes to incident response. How do you prepare for, detect, contain, analyze, and recover from incidents involving these technologies? Here are some best practices to help you handle incidents with emerging tech.
Before you dive into the technical aspects of incident response, you need to understand the business impact and priorities of the emerging technologies you are using or planning to use. What are the goals, benefits, and risks of these technologies for your organization? How do they align with your overall strategy and objectives? How do they affect your compliance and regulatory requirements? By answering these questions, you can define the scope, roles, and responsibilities of your incident response team, as well as the metrics and reporting methods to measure your performance and effectiveness.
In my approach to handling incidents involving emerging tech like cloud or IoT, the starting point is always alignment with business goals. Before even diving into the technical aspects, I ask, "What's the business impact? How does this technology fit into our larger strategy?" These questions help me define the scope and priorities for my incident response team. Knowing the business implications also informs compliance considerations and shapes the metrics we use to gauge our performance. In short, understanding the business context allows us to be agile and targeted in our response, ensuring that we're not just resolving issues, but doing so in a way that aligns with our organizational objectives.
Before tackling the technicalities of incident response, assess the business impact and priorities of your emerging technologies. Understand their goals, benefits, and risks, and how they align with your organization’s overall strategy. Evaluate their implications for compliance and regulatory requirements. This clarity helps define your incident response team’s scope, roles, and responsibilities, and establishes relevant metrics and reporting methods. By aligning your incident response framework with your technology strategy, you ensure that your response efforts are effective, compliant, and supportive of your organization’s broader objectives.
Emerging technologies may require you to update or create new policies and procedures for your incident response. For example, you may need to revise your incident classification and escalation criteria, your data retention and backup policies, your communication and notification protocols, and your incident documentation and reporting standards. You may also need to establish new agreements and contracts with your vendors, partners, and customers regarding the security and availability of the emerging technologies. Make sure your policies and procedures are clear, consistent, and compliant with the relevant standards and regulations.
For me, embracing emerging tech is often synonymous with revising policies and procedures. It's not a one-off; it's ongoing. For instance, implementing cloud solutions may prompt a reevaluation of data retention and backup policies. It's vital to keep these frameworks agile, adaptable, and, above all, compliant with current standards and regulations. This might also involve revisiting contracts with vendors to ensure they're up-to-date with the nuances that new technologies bring. In essence, policies and procedures aren't static documents but living guidelines that evolve to accommodate the ever-changing tech landscape while keeping us aligned with compliance and business objectives. Thanks, Leah, for helping me learn this!
Revise incident classification and escalation criteria to address new risks, and update data retention, backup policies, and communication protocols accordingly. Ensure your incident documentation and reporting standards reflect these changes. Additionally, establish clear agreements with vendors, partners, and customers to address security and availability concerns. Maintain clarity, consistency, and compliance with relevant standards and regulations to ensure your policies and procedures effectively support your evolving technological landscape.
Your incident response team needs to have the skills, tools, and resources to handle incidents with emerging tech. This means you need to provide them with regular training and education on the latest trends, threats, and best practices related to the emerging technologies you are using or considering. You also need to equip them with the appropriate tools and platforms to monitor, analyze, and respond to incidents involving these technologies. For example, you may need to use cloud-based or AI-powered solutions to collect, correlate, and visualize data from multiple sources and devices. You may also need to use specialized tools to deal with incidents involving encryption, smart contracts, or machine learning.
On tools, having a secure, out-of-band communication platform is key to unlocking faster incident response. Communication is heightened during a crisis and requires an isolated environment to restore trust in communication.
Provide regular training on the latest trends, threats, and best practices specific to these technologies. Invest in advanced tools and platforms—such as cloud-based or AI-driven solutions—for comprehensive data monitoring, analysis, and visualization. Incorporate specialized tools for managing encryption, smart contracts, and machine learning incidents. This approach ensures your team is prepared, knowledgeable, and well-equipped to navigate the complexities of modern technological challenges.
You cannot afford to wait until a real incident occurs to test and improve your incident response plan for emerging tech. You need to conduct regular simulations and exercises to validate your plan, identify gaps and weaknesses, and implement corrective actions. You also need to review and update your plan based on the feedback and lessons learned from each simulation or exercise, as well as from any actual incidents that may occur. By testing and improving your plan, you can enhance your readiness, resilience, and recovery capabilities.
Planning a response plan is crucial for coping with incidents in emerging tech: ? Brainstorm on what can go wrong when implementing emerging tech, focusing on data breaches, system failures, and tech-related security gaps. ? Clarify individual roles to cover incident identification, escalation protocols, containment, recovery, & review. ? Update the tech security solutions, and train your employees on the same. ? Run simulations often. These mock drills will often identify insufficient training, ambiguity, or new risk factors. ? Post-incident reviews are essential to build the internal resilience of the organization. Emerging tech is constantly evolving, and so are its associated risks. The organization should stay updated on the same.
Reading Vikas Dhawan's insights, I particularly agree with his emphasis on running simulations often. These mock drills serve as invaluable "stress tests" for our preparedness in the rapidly evolving landscape of emerging tech. From my perspective, what's equally critical is the review and update cycle that follows each simulation. It’s essential to dissect both our wins and losses to continuously fine-tune our incident response plans. Each drill or actual incident isn't just a test but a vital learning experience. It helps us not just prepare for but also adapt to the uncertainties of new technologies. This approach keeps us not just reactive but proactive, enhancing our overall readiness and resilience.
Finally, you need to learn and share from your experiences and best practices in handling incidents with emerging tech. You need to conduct thorough post-incident reviews and analysis to determine the root causes, impacts, and remediation steps of each incident. You also need to share your findings, recommendations, and improvements with your stakeholders, peers, and community. By learning and sharing, you can foster a culture of continuous improvement, collaboration, and innovation in your organization.
I understand the concept of "learn and share" as more than a best practice—it's essential when dealing with emerging tech. Conducting thorough post-incident reviews provides us with actionable insights that can shape future strategies. But the key is sharing this valuable information. Distributing our findings to stakeholders, peers, and the wider community creates a collaborative environment. In doing so, we cultivate continuous improvement and innovation, equipping ourselves and others to better manage the challenges of fast-evolving technologies.