Incident management is the process of recognising events that will affect your organisation, reacting appropriately to those events, and then responding quickly to resume normal operations. Events can range from public relations mishaps, internal or external security breaches, natural or unnatural disasters, terrorism, unintended privacy violations, unexpected financial situations, and a host of other conditions that can interrupt normal activities.

The incident management process transcends conventional thinking, which pigeonholes problems and solutions according to their cause. Instead, it focuses on the need to function well in the face of adversity, regardless of the cause. When planning is organisation-wide and cross discipline, then there is incident management.

Incident management takes an enterprise-wide, cross discipline view of an organisation and its objectives, so that all work done to counter any threat can be made directly applicable to all other threats. For example, a terrorist attack on a building with a resulting outage in information systems may have much in common with a natural disaster such as a flood or a local issue such as a power failure. The measures taken to counter that threat can also act to counter the threat of internal sabotage by a disgruntled employee.

Incident management takes a long and wide view to bring together the disparate elements of Incident Response, Crisis Management, Disaster Recovery Planning, Business Continuation Planning, Health and Safety Plans and other such projects into one overriding project that enhances protection with increased cost-effectiveness and a better return on investment.

IMCD™ makes the knowledge required to build an incident management plan available to smaller organisations, but without the price tag of a long term consulting engagement. The plan is easy to understand and very cost effective, providing businesses with the capability to recognise, react, and respond to incidents.

Find out how IMCD helps you collect the information required for an effective incident management plan, that includes both ongoing and emergency operating procedures, together with a gap analysis that details the steps you need to take to achieve a better chance of survival.