Currently, IT is responsible for the technological support in the operationalization of a large part of organizational activities. For this reason, IT incident management is essential to ensure process continuity or restore them as quickly as possible, ensuring the maintenance of service quality and avoiding losses.
After all, according to research, 46% of IT incidents are caused by company employees, who tend to hide the facts to avoid punishment.
Thus, it is necessary to establish incident management at multiple levels, tailored to the characteristics and needs of the business. All of this in order to reduce system fragility and ensure the commitment of all users, and not just the department responsible for IT security.
Below, discover some practices that can strengthen IT incident management and understand how you can prepare your team to handle unexpected events in an agile and efficient manner.
Summary
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1. Document service templates
A company may face frequent and similar incidents. At such times, it is common for the responsible teams to focus on solving the problem. However, they often fail to document the procedures performed.
The result of this lack of documentation is the waste of working hours searching for solutions that have already been developed previously. This is a problem that could be solved by creating service templates for known incidents.
In this case, the standard procedure would be the documentation of all actions taken by support, creating a knowledge base. In it, incidents would be identified and, upon a new occurrence, those responsible would quickly find a guideline to solve the problem.
2. Classify IT incidents with their real priority
The moment the IT team is called, every requester considers their demand a priority. However, the reality is that assisting everyone at the same time is not possible — and chronological order is not always the most appropriate for the organization as a whole.
IT must, therefore, establish criteria for service priority. Therefore, a very important item in incident logging is precisely classification. It establishes criticality levels that will be observed when determining the order of resolution.
Each organization’s reality needs to be analyzed with a holistic view to identify the impact of each incident on the operations most critical to the business. Thus, one can evaluate:
- How many people or systems are affected by the incident;
- How quickly it needs to be restored.
It is important to note that an incident affecting a larger number of people is not always the most urgent one. One must consider the impact of each situation on the company’s activities as a whole to establish this hierarchy of priorities, which can be supported by the following scheme:
- Category: defines the asset comprising the company’s infrastructure or catalog affected by the incident — hardware or software, for example;
- Priority: analyzes from the perspective of the impact the incident may bring to the company’s operations and the urgency of the solution — that is, the estimated time frame for resolving the ticket.
When these criteria are clear, incident management is facilitated. The IT team then gains more objective direction regarding what to address first. Thus, users have the assurance that they will be properly assisted in accordance with the organization’s priorities.
Read also: 5 tips to efficiently reduce IT incidents in your company
3. Analyze the causes of IT incidents
Research data reveals that 28% of phishing attacks use employees as an entry point to compromise the IT infrastructure, with conventional malware causing infections in 53% of incidents.
The most common causes of vulnerabilities are:
- Phishing emails;
- Weak passwords;
- Connection of infected devices (such as USB drives);
- Fake technical support calls;
- Unprotected IT infrastructure.
It is not enough to develop mechanisms that favor the immediate solution of incidents. Although unexpected events can always happen, it is important for IT to seek alternatives to reduce their incidence and prevent recurrences.
To this end, it is fundamental to analyze the causes of failures and propose temporary and definitive solutions. The focus, in this case, is not to minimize the impact or quickly restore ideal system conditions, but simply to prevent problems from happening again.
In the medium term, this approach reduces calls to the service desk and allows the team to be called upon to “put out fires” less frequently, ensuring more time to develop truly innovative features for the company.
4. Choose appropriate tools for IT incident management
The existence of vulnerabilities and system criticality levels, even if minimal, justify the implementation of GRC methodologies (Governance, Risk, and Compliance).
These are frameworks that guide process mapping and ensure the proper correction of incidents under best-practice and globally recognized control standards. Get to know them below.
COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies)
Owned by ISACA, these are globally accepted tools and analytical models developed for IT governance and incident management. The most recent version is COBIT 5, widely used for management and IT risk mitigation.
Read also: Contingency strategies: how to act in case of IT incidents
ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library)
This framework is widely used in IT service management and encompasses practices for prototyping, implementation, transition (change management), operationalization, and continuous service improvement.
Furthermore, it allows for application in IT incident management, having documented best practices in business and government processes since the 1980s. For this reason, it is a global reference in the standardization of technology-related processes.
The IT incident management workflow, based on the ITIL methodology, involves:
- IT incident detection: most incidents originate from user requests across multiple support channels provided, such as telephone, chats, and emails;
- IT incident diagnosis: this history must be classified and documented so that a standard operating procedure can be established;
- IT incident resolution: aims to find the best way to resolve an incident, with solutions also categorized by support levels until the ticket is handled by the competent sector;
- IT incident closure: ensures that the incident is truly resolved and that all service details are formalized and properly archived;
- Continuous monitoring: an IT incident is not always resolved on the first call, making it necessary to create mechanisms to resume support.
FAIR (Factor Analysis of Information Risk)
FAIR — Factor Analysis of Information Risk — is also a proprietary method that helps companies measure and analyze the criticality level of aspects related to information security and operational risks.
Awareness of vulnerabilities is growing in the corporate environment. As studies point out, 35% of companies participating in the surveys seek to improve security through team training, while 43% do so by implementing more sophisticated systems.
Additionally, FAIR seeks to provide a foundation and structure to strengthen processes rather than replace them, complementing frameworks such as COBIT and ITIL.
Ultimately, IT incident management is a challenge, but with the right direction, it contributes to organizational efficiency, the delivery of good results, and the guarantee of quality service provision.
This more accurate guidance is only possible through knowledge. Therefore, we have selected material that can guide you on the best application management practices. Check it out below!
