Understanding the Incident Response Life Cycle

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IT service management (ITSM) teams spend much of their time fielding general service requests like access permissions and software updates. But not all IT issues are so benign. There’s a whole category that has the power to bring business operations to a halt: IT incidents.

What are IT incidents?

IT incidents are unforeseen, urgent problems like service outages or security threats that need to be dealt with STAT. The process of resolving them as quickly as possible forms the incident response life cycle (sometimes called the incident management lifecycle or incident response framework). And optimizing this life cycle is crucial, because IT incidents have major risks attached, whether related to security, downtime, or peoples’ ability to do their work.

The incident response life cycle is a business-critical KPI with costs, data protection, and customer satisfaction at stake. And it begins the moment an incident flares up and the ITSM team parachutes in. Let’s follow their journey through each step of the process, then dive deeper into how it all can be optimized.

The stages of the incident response life cycle

There are different variations of the incident response process. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), for example, segments it into preparation, detection and analysis, containment recovery, and post-incident activity. But the cycle ultimately comes down to four key stages.

1. Detecting an incident

Incidents can seemingly emerge from anywhere. And that only becomes truer the larger an enterprise grows, as complex processes offer more hiding places for vulnerabilities and major problems to creep in.
Monitoring incidents across every function and system is therefore essential. Incident detection needs to be as instantaneous as possible – the longer the delay, the greater the impact on productivity, revenue and customer relationships (especially if they’re the ones alerting you to the problem).

A robust classification and reporting process is particularly important in large enterprises where events are likely to be more frequent. Clear and accurate prioritization in terms of incident severity helps ITSM teams manage high volumes and respond effectively to mitigate business impact.

2. Assigning the incident

Once ITSM teams have logged an incident, the next step is routing it to the right technician. ITSM teams are often comprised of specialists spanning different software, hardware, and cybersecurity protocols. Who an incident is assigned to determines the speed and success of the resolution. Misassignment or inefficient manual routing prolong the time til incident resolution, increasing the delay before a technician can even begin getting to work on an incident response plan.

Automated incident routing can therefore be a lifeline for ITSM teams. Tickets can be analyzed by automation software for characteristics that help point them to the right ITSM group. This is a faster process than manual assignment, and it eliminates any human error that can extend resolution times.

3. Triaging and resolving the incident

After an IT incident has been routed to the most qualified technician, they can then thoroughly investigate the scale and root causes. Questions for an incident response procedure typically include:

How many systems, users, and locations are affected?
Is it a software or hardware issue?
Is it arising internally or externally, such as from a third-party software provider or integration?
Is the threat contained?

Establishing this scope ensures the remedial action will be comprehensive. The incident responder can then restore service in the affected system and resolve any vulnerabilities

4. Post-incident analysis

Once the incident is closed, normal operation can resume. But there’s one final stage of work for ITSM teams to do. This is known as post-incident analysis.

A rigorous post-incident review is meant to yield crucial learnings about potential blindspots and improvement opportunities in IT processes. This stage should zero in on incidents that were mishandled or took too long to be resolved, as these cases will contain the most urgent optimizations needed for vulnerability management – and some telltale signs about your IT process efficiency.

Businesses typically send a root cause analysis to affected users as part of post-event activity, explaining what happened and the preventative measures that have been implemented. Sending these follow-ups quickly helps IT keep lines of communication with the business open, and it’s nearly as important as prompt incident resolution — but it can sometimes be neglected if ITSM teams lack a way to prioritize incidents, or their processes aren’t streamlined enough to allow them the capacity.

However, Celonis offers tailor-made solutions that ITSM teams can depend on to help them through incidents.

Optimizing the incident response life cycle with Celonis’s ITSM solutions

It’s tough to improve your incident response capability or minimize potential threats without understanding how the related processes work. That’s where the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform comes in. It uses process mining to construct an accurate, objective, real-time view of how incident-related responses actually run.

For example, the Platform can connect incident management systems such as ServiceNow or BMC Remedy to give ITSM teams visibility into the paths that incidents take.

The Celonis Process Explorer, a part of the Platform, follows incidents through your assignment group landscape and beyond, including all the related events (the opening, resolving, and closing of the incident) along the way. From there, the Platform includes extra solutions to take you from insight to action.

Prefer to watch or listen, rather than read? Hear about both the Incident Management Starter Kit and the AI Annotation Builder in this ITSM-themed session from Celosphere 2024.

Surface value opportunities by understanding how your current processes run

Celonis recently released a powerful way of uncovering improvement opportunities and monitoring incident management KPIs over time: the Incident Management Starter Kit.

This solution was created to help IT teams understand how incident management processes are actually running, then identify and leverage opportunities for greater efficiency. It compiles process knowledge, best practices, and KPIs from Celonis’ years of IT experience.

You can use the Starter Kit to see which process flows are affecting your multi-hop rate, as well as how your processes are impacting your time to resolution. Better still, the dashboard prioritizes the value opportunities to target according to their impact.

For example, with the Starter Kit, you can reduce unnecessary routing rules and prevent inefficiencies from missing information. Perhaps your assignment categories could be simpler, and you want to better structure your assignment groups. Or maybe you want to automate incident classification and routing. All these capabilities are part of the Incident Management Starter Kit.

Automate incident response processes with AI

Another recent release, the AI Annotation Builder can rapidly validate categorization and classification.

Simply enter incidents with descriptions into a large language model (LLM), then prompt the AI to return a category, subcategory, and priority. The AI can append your Celonis data model for analysis while flagging discrepancies in existing categorizations for you to investigate. The AI Annotation Builder can also route tickets to assignment groups based on incident descriptions, all driving greater value from your ITSM free text data.

Prioritize post-incident analysis for greater customer satisfaction and business value

ITSM teams no longer need to struggle to identify their highest-priority incidents and customers.

The Celonis Platform enables end-to-end visibility for a complete understanding of customer context, rather than a point-in-time view. This means an incident response team can prioritize business units and customers by pinpointing repeat or major outages.

With Celonis, the business isn’t just handling incidents as quickly and effectively as possible, but also examining the resolution process — including frequency and severity — to prevent similar future incidents.The platform’s high-level view empowers you to optimize your incident management processes so incidents recur much less frequently.

Ready to improve service quality, increase IT productivity, and manage risk? Tune in to our ITSM Starter Kit demo for a closer look at everything in action.