Inevitably, organizations that use technology (regardless of the extent) will have something, somewhere, go wrong. The key to a successful organization is to have the tools and processes in place to handle these incidents and get systems restored in a repeatable and reliable way in as little time as possible.
With the rising complexity of our digital ecosystems, incidents are occurring at an unprecedented rate. To combat the additional strain, incident responders are looking to software to help them establish a scalable, repeatable incident response process that reduces toil and noise and gets the right people on the scene at the right time. The best incident response software addresses the entire lifecycle of an incident.
When building an incident response process, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the moving parts. Less is more: focus first on building solid foundations that you can develop over time. Here are three things we think form a key part of a strong process. I’d recommend taking these one at a time, introducing incident response throughout your organisation. Just being honest: we’re a startup selling incident management software.
Downtime—especially in customer-facing services—can cost businesses thousands of dollars an hour and incalculable customer trust. No company can afford to pay this price. To reduce downtime, software engineering teams must act quickly and decisively. But that’s easier said than done. With Lightstep® Incident Response, generally available from ServiceNow today, we're unlocking speed, agility, and productivity for your engineers and your software-powered business.
There’s no one-size-fits-all incident response process. Depending on your organisation’s shape and size, you’ll have different requirements and priorities. But the same three pillars form the core of any good process, whether it’s for the largest e-commerce giant or a scrappy SaaS startup.
What makes an engineering team? Communication, collaboration, process, order, and common goals. Otherwise, they would just be a bunch of engineers. The same is true of their tools. Connectivity and process turn a bunch of tools into a DevOps toolchain. If you need a DevOp toolchain, you can use it to easily build an incident response process.
