Oh, you thought you were alone in facing some embarrassing moments? I can reassure you; you are not. Most companies face a myriad of issues with their IT. The key is to manage them to support your business efficiently.

1. Get people to safety by following the floor warden's information and get out if needed
   If there are no floor wardens, YOU take the initiative and alert people. Vacate the premises if you suspect danger.
   Err on the side of caution. Nobody ever got fired over keeping people safe.
2. Get people to safety (yes! double check this)
3. Check what is happening
4. Stop the bleeding
5. Check what you broke while stopping the bleeding
6. Check if you need to go into DR mode
7. Go into DR mode if that is the fastest way to restore the service
8. Only now start to look deeper

Notice what is missing in this list?

• WHY did this happen?
• WHO did what

During the first reactions to an event, stick to the facts of what is happening and the symptoms. If the symptoms are bad, attend to people first, no matter the financial losses occurring.
Remember that financial losses are typically insured. Human life is not. Only loss of income and ability to pay is insured! Not the person's life.

The WHY, HOW, WHO and other root cause questions are asked in the aftermath of the incident and after you have stabilized the situation.
In ITIL terms, those are Problem Management and Root Cause Analysis stage questions.

Having clear incident management protocols within your company is important to help you deal with any incident which may occur. As an incident management consulting firm, Tymans Group is happy to offer advice and assistance. Thanks to our experience as an incident management firm, we can offer practical solutions which are people-oriented and based on extensive field-experience to provide your company with helpful solutions.

The challenge you face with incident management within your company

Incident management is all about fighting fires within your company, but fighting fires gives the impression you are not in control. Getting in control is handled within problem management, so we'll deal with that there. In incident management, you need to get in control of an acute situation which has arisen within your firm. You deal with the structural issues in problem management. Repetitive interruptions erode trust in IT, so it is important you deal with these structural issues in a timely manner.

The advice of our incident management consulting firm

Insight

• During a crisis, stick to the chain of command. Who is in charge? Not you! The incident manager is in control.
• Incidents cannot be planned. They happen! Your ability to deal with them is essential.

Impact and results 

• Clearly define the role and profile of your incident managers.
• Develop your incident management workflow so that incidents cost less money.
• Link high-priority incidents and repetitive incidents to "problems."

The roadmap to effective incident management within your company

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within our consulting company’s incident management domain have access to:

Start here

• Read our Incident management - Executive brief (ppt)

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Identify your most essential incidents

• Incident Management – Phase 1: Identify and Manage Major/Critical Incidents (ppt)
• Critical Incident Management SOP (doc)
• Incident Severity Assessment Tool (xls)
• Knowledgebase Article Template (doc)
• Incident Manager (doc)

Problem managementis included in this guidance!

Buy Incident and problem management Guidance Now.

Discover our incident management solutions

Prepare your company for incidents which may occur at any time by setting up proper incident management and risk management protocols with clear guidelines. Our incident management consultancy firm’s CEO Gert Taeymans is happy to advise you on the matter and help you with any issues you encounter during a one-hour talk. Interested? Book an appointment online or contact us through the online form.

Cyber-ransomware criminals need to make sure that you cannot simply recover your encrypted data via your backups. They must make it look like paying is your only option. And if you do not have a strategy that takes this into account, unfortunately, you may be up the creek without a paddle. because how do they make their case? Bylooking for ways to infect your backups, way before you find out you have been compromised. 

That means your standard disaster recovery scenarios provide insufficient protection against this type of event. You need to think beyond DRP and give consideration to what John Beattie and Michael Shandrowski call "Cyber Incident Recovery Risk management" (CIR-RM).