The way people communicate during “peacetime” and “wartime” is very different. When at peace, we are able to be more casual and creative with the words we use. During wartime, this changes. Language must be specific, direct, and actionable in order to communicate clearly to identify an issue and what actions need to be taken, by who.

Many of today’s terms used in IT incident management are taken directly from terms widely adopted from disaster response teams in medical and environmental fields.

This whitepaper provides:

• An overview of essential terms that support clear and accurate communication during the incident management process
• Terms surrounding on-call management
• Explanations for language needed throughout the five stages of incident management which are: Preparation, Detection & Alerting, Containment, Remediation, and Analysis