Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In 2021, the Biden administration issued an executive order outlining that the government and private sector need to work together to combat cyberthreats and improve the nation’s collective cybersecurity stance. As cyberattacks become more common and more costly, the United States — like other nation-states — needs to do everything it can to prevent attacks and rapidly respond to them when they occur, which requires modernizing its approach to incident response.

Last week we launched a number of features across the PagerDuty Operations Cloud portfolio to help teams minimize downtime and protect customer experience. One of the areas where PagerDuty continues to invest is collaboration and communication during incident response to ensure that all impacted stakeholders across the business are updated in real-time.

As a former incident responder and now as a responder advocate for FireHydrant, I’ve seen the “build vs. buy” debate play out many times. In fact, I even supported the tool that former employers used for managing incidents for years before they decided to buy (more on that in a future blog post).

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.

When critical incidents happen — which they inevitably do 😅 — and you’re in the middle of trying to figure out what the best thing to do is, it can feel comforting to know that you’ve got a pre-prepared list of instructions to follow, commonly known as an “incident response plan”: In theory this sounds quite simple, and a typical flow you might envision is: It might be tempting to think that the hardest part of running incidents is finding or writing a checkl

As a solutions engineer for FireHydrant, I speak with a wide variety of companies about their incident management programs — from start-ups with a handful of employees to large enterprise companies with thousands of engineers. Whether they’re looking to establish their incident management program or mature it, the same questions remain.

Resolving the incident is only half the battle when it comes to responding to incidents. For many teams, incident communication is an afterthought, leaving stakeholders inside and outside the organization guessing what happened. But ensuring that important information about the incident is disseminated clearly and quickly is essential.

World-class incident responders are a strategic asset in today’s world where the frequency and sophistication of cyber security attacks continue to increase every year, as do the associated financial damages: As such, more and more organizations are looking to grow their cyber incident response expertise, both with inhouse staff as well as by engaging with third-party experts.

At incident.io, we empower teams to run incidents quickly and effectively from start to finish. One of the ways we help is by taking the manual admin out of your incidents. More often than not, folks are spending too much time thinking about the process, when the time would be better spent focusing on fixing. Our automated workflows, nudges and prompts help to embed best practices and unlock time for more impactful work.