An incident can take many forms. It can look like a small issue that locks a few customers out of their accounts or a huge catastrophe that brings down your entire product for a full day. How you respond to the incident should vary based on the impact of the incident. And that’s where severity comes into play. Defined severity levels are crucial to any good incident management program.

Incidents are costly. It’s not just revenue that takes a hit every time you have an outage–brand reputation and client satisfaction are also on the line. To protect current and future revenue, companies have to deliver on customer expectations. Innovation alone is no longer enough: digital experiences must also be fast, flawless, and highly available. This means teams have to get more proactive with real-time, unplanned work.

Cyber Essentials is a UK government backed scheme, developed by the National Cyber Security Centre. Since its inception the scheme has become the benchmark for IT security, helping organizations to deploy technical controls to guard against the common types of cyber-attacks and improve data security.

On-call is a special working hour arrangement under employment law. It comes into effect when the employee is obliged to be contactable at least by phone, so they can start work in an emergency. On-call duty is generally counted as time specifically meant for work purposes. In practice, this means that employees are normally not allowed to work while on-call. However, there may be exceptions. For example, on-call employees may also work from home if they can be reached through their work device.

Not long ago, monitoring tools were just nice additions to have and did not have a lot of purposes. However, as technologies scaled up and became more complex, keeping track of all the systems and their health became a huge challenge. As more and more brands started offering new digital services and moved the existing platform, the competition skyrocketed and being on top of system health and proactively resolving potential incidents became crucial.

Not long ago, monitoring tools were just nice additions to have and did not have a lot of purposes. However, as technologies scaled up and became more complex, keeping track of all the systems and their health became a huge challenge. As more and more brands started offering new digital services and moved the existing platform, the competition skyrocketed and being on top of system health and proactively resolving potential incidents became crucial.

The ITIL definition of an incident is “an unplanned interruption to or a reduction in quality of an IT Service or unavailability of the service”. An incident could be caused by an asset that is not functioning properly or a network failure, or a human error.

It is getting spooky out there, folks! Every year on October 31, we don our spookiest (or silliest) garb, an evolution of old practices where people would dress up to ward off ghouls, goblins and all manner of things that go bump in the night. After all, people believed these pesky spirits stirred up trouble. While pieces of this spooky tradition persist, just a few other things have changed in the past 2,000 years. For starters, we are a digital society.

There is a famous quote that goes like this…‘For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.’ At least in the world of incident response, nothing is more apt than this. Digital infrastructure these days is made up of multiple services, an outage could result from either one impacted service or multiple impacted services. So it's essential to have a catalog of all the services along with the point of contact (service owner) responsible for maintaining it.

As usual, it’s been all systems go at incident.io this month. New joiners, new features and new swag (yes, you heard right!). But most excitingly, we launched our new podcast this week. We had a blast recording it - we hope you enjoy listening to it just as much. Here’s a round-up of some of this month's highlights…