How can incident handling align with your organization's business objectives?

1 Define your incident handling goals

The first step to align your incident handling with your business objectives is to define your goals and metrics for the process. What are the outcomes that you want to achieve from incident handling? How will you measure your performance and effectiveness? How will you communicate your results and value to your stakeholders? Your goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, you could aim to reduce the mean time to detect, contain, and resolve incidents, or to increase the customer satisfaction and trust after an incident.

2 Align your incident handling policies and procedures

The next step is to align your incident handling policies and procedures with your goals and business objectives. This means that you should design and document your incident handling process according to best practices and standards, such as NIST SP 800-61 or ISO/IEC 27035. You should also define the roles and responsibilities of your incident handling team and other stakeholders, such as management, legal, public relations, and external partners. Your policies and procedures should reflect your organizational culture, values, and priorities, as well as your regulatory and contractual obligations.

3 Train and equip your incident handling team

The third step is to train and equip your incident handling team with the necessary skills, tools, and resources to perform their tasks effectively and efficiently. Your team should have a diverse and complementary set of competencies, such as technical, analytical, communication, and leadership skills. You should also provide them with the appropriate tools and platforms to collect, analyze, and share incident data, such as SIEM, SOAR, or IRM solutions. Moreover, you should invest in regular training and exercises to keep your team updated and prepared for different types of incidents.

4 Integrate your incident handling with other processes

The fourth step is to integrate your incident handling with other processes that support your business objectives, such as risk management, business continuity, disaster recovery, and compliance. You should establish clear and consistent interfaces and workflows between your incident handling team and other functions, such as IT operations, security operations, audit, and governance. You should also leverage the lessons learned and feedback from incident handling to improve your security posture, resilience, and maturity.

5 Review and improve your incident handling

The final step is to review and improve your incident handling on a regular basis, based on your goals and metrics. You should conduct periodic audits and assessments to evaluate your incident handling process, performance, and outcomes. You should also collect and analyze data and feedback from your team, stakeholders, customers, and partners. You should identify the gaps, challenges, and opportunities for improvement, and implement corrective and preventive actions. You should also benchmark your incident handling against industry standards and best practices, and adopt the latest trends and innovations.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?