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A few minutes of unexpected downtime can have catastrophic effects! Having a great incident response plan is more than a luxury - it is a necessity for organisations of all sizes today. This blog outlines key activities that can help you in formulating a better incidence plan.
Picture this scenario - your organisation has suffered a catastrophic outage, phones are ringing off the hook and customers are ranting online. Unfortunately, you do not have a reliable plan to deal with this unexpected happening. Already under significant pressure, you start throwing resources at the problem. However, without a proper incident response plan in place the remediation process is haphazard and inefficient, thereby, further increasing the time it takes to respond, leaving your already unhappy customers in the dark.
Having a great incident response plan is more than a luxury - it is a necessity for organisations of all sizes today. In this blog we answer some of the major questions that come to mind while designing and implementing your response plan. Building an intelligent incident response plan is not something that can be achieved overnight, it requires commitment, planning and quite a few tweaks before it works well for your organisation. Like interlocking parts that connect to a whole - a great incident response plan is only as good as the parts it's composed of. But everyone needs a place to start. This blog looks at the benefits, things to consider while creating the plan, and the tools you need. While writing this blog we have also strived to be industry, domain and tool agnostic. Our recommendations will also work with your existing on-call setup.
A major incident that will affect a lion’s share of your customers is inevitable. Even the most carefully architectured system is likely to break down under unknown variable circumstances. These outages can have a crippling effect on your reputation from which it may be difficult to recover. An incident response plan is the foundation from which you can start the response and recovery process from major outages. A great incident response plan needs to take into account the post-outage communication strategies as well. A notable example of effective communication post a major outage can be found in Slack’s blog post addressed to their users.
As a smaller organisation an effective incident response plan is even more essential since any outage can potentially lead to a loss of trust. Startups may see a sudden increase in their number of users and as you scale up your infrastructure, your incident response plan needs to adjust accordingly.
Even the smallest of startups (2-4 person team) can start thinking about improving their incident response process. While the plan may be less formal than one for larger organisations processes, like documentation, automation for runbooks will still have a large impact. For example, if you are a small startup in charge of looking after the technical infrastructure of a large financial services organisation documenting your incident response process with the help of automated incident timelines and providing observability to the larger organisation with role based access can help you avoid potential liabilities in the future. In many sectors especially finance and cybersecurity, for compliance reasons there is a requirement to have proper documentation of every major incident that occurs.
While this blog covers the most common ways you can start building an incident response plan, it is by no means an exhaustive document. These recommendations scratch the surface for building a comprehensive plan. No plan survives contact with a major catastrophe but that doesn't mean that you don't start planning. Like all other planning exercises its effectiveness, will be put to test when you face your first major incident. In a modern distributed architecture stack not only the application but the environment/hardware it is deployed on may be changing constantly as well. Having a culture of collaboration is an essential part of better incident response. Depending upon your organisation it can take anything from a couple of weeks to a couple of months to come up with a better incident response plan that works well for you.
What do you struggle with as a DevOps/SRE? Do you have ideas on how incident response could be done better in your organization? We would be thrilled to hear from you! Leave us a comment or reach out over a DM via Twitter and let us know your thoughts.
Squadcast is an incident management tool that’s purpose-built for SRE. Your team can get rid of unwanted alerts, receive relevant notifications, work in collaboration using the virtual incident war rooms, and use automated tools like runbooks to eliminate toil.
A few minutes of unexpected downtime can have catastrophic effects! Having a great incident response plan is more than a luxury - it is a necessity for organisations of all sizes today. This blog outlines key activities that can help you in formulating a better incidence plan.
Picture this scenario - your organisation has suffered a catastrophic outage, phones are ringing off the hook and customers are ranting online. Unfortunately, you do not have a reliable plan to deal with this unexpected happening. Already under significant pressure, you start throwing resources at the problem. However, without a proper incident response plan in place the remediation process is haphazard and inefficient, thereby, further increasing the time it takes to respond, leaving your already unhappy customers in the dark.
Having a great incident response plan is more than a luxury - it is a necessity for organisations of all sizes today. In this blog we answer some of the major questions that come to mind while designing and implementing your response plan. Building an intelligent incident response plan is not something that can be achieved overnight, it requires commitment, planning and quite a few tweaks before it works well for your organisation. Like interlocking parts that connect to a whole - a great incident response plan is only as good as the parts it's composed of. But everyone needs a place to start. This blog looks at the benefits, things to consider while creating the plan, and the tools you need. While writing this blog we have also strived to be industry, domain and tool agnostic. Our recommendations will also work with your existing on-call setup.
A major incident that will affect a lion’s share of your customers is inevitable. Even the most carefully architectured system is likely to break down under unknown variable circumstances. These outages can have a crippling effect on your reputation from which it may be difficult to recover. An incident response plan is the foundation from which you can start the response and recovery process from major outages. A great incident response plan needs to take into account the post-outage communication strategies as well. A notable example of effective communication post a major outage can be found in Slack’s blog post addressed to their users.
As a smaller organisation an effective incident response plan is even more essential since any outage can potentially lead to a loss of trust. Startups may see a sudden increase in their number of users and as you scale up your infrastructure, your incident response plan needs to adjust accordingly.
Even the smallest of startups (2-4 person team) can start thinking about improving their incident response process. While the plan may be less formal than one for larger organisations processes, like documentation, automation for runbooks will still have a large impact. For example, if you are a small startup in charge of looking after the technical infrastructure of a large financial services organisation documenting your incident response process with the help of automated incident timelines and providing observability to the larger organisation with role based access can help you avoid potential liabilities in the future. In many sectors especially finance and cybersecurity, for compliance reasons there is a requirement to have proper documentation of every major incident that occurs.
While this blog covers the most common ways you can start building an incident response plan, it is by no means an exhaustive document. These recommendations scratch the surface for building a comprehensive plan. No plan survives contact with a major catastrophe but that doesn't mean that you don't start planning. Like all other planning exercises its effectiveness, will be put to test when you face your first major incident. In a modern distributed architecture stack not only the application but the environment/hardware it is deployed on may be changing constantly as well. Having a culture of collaboration is an essential part of better incident response. Depending upon your organisation it can take anything from a couple of weeks to a couple of months to come up with a better incident response plan that works well for you.
What do you struggle with as a DevOps/SRE? Do you have ideas on how incident response could be done better in your organization? We would be thrilled to hear from you! Leave us a comment or reach out over a DM via Twitter and let us know your thoughts.
Squadcast is an incident management tool that’s purpose-built for SRE. Your team can get rid of unwanted alerts, receive relevant notifications, work in collaboration using the virtual incident war rooms, and use automated tools like runbooks to eliminate toil.