Although IT incidents have always been a concern, the increase in customer-facing technology adds the cost of a bad customer experience to the cost of responding to and remediating an incident. While in a perfect world, you’d be able to prevent incidents from happening in the first place, the reality is they do happen and more often than most of us would like to admit.

When an incident strikes, an organization’s reputation and revenue, as well as customer trust are at stake. Assembling an effective incident response team is critical to minimizing the incident’s impact. But what exactly is an incident response team? Who should be a part of the team and what are their responsibilities? Successful incident responses require a team with a diverse set of problem-solving and communication skills.

With Halloween behind us and the holiday shopping season fast approaching, engineering and product teams know what that means: code freezes! At xMatters, code freezes are a part of our product release process in anticipation of the busiest — and most important — time of the year for many of our customers. But code freezes are just one piece of the puzzle in how we ensure our customers have the most reliable experiences. The way our product releases are designed is much more than that.