At its core, enterprise incident management is the process of providing incident management processes and technology to a specific team or business. IT often faces incidents which have the potential to disrupt or waylay the team or the company. To successfully and quickly resolve these critical incidents, teams need to have a carefully considered plan in place ahead of time.
Enterprise incident management brings together processes such as ticketing, alerting, escalations, reporting and documentation to the incident response team and the company as a whole so that there is a sustainable and repeatable process to minimize time to incident resolution.
The main goal of the enterprise incident management process is to restore normal service operations to the enterprise as quickly as possible. By doing so, the company will minimize the adverse impact of outages on the business and ensure that the optimal level of service quality is maintained. This optimal level of service is precisely defined in the service level agreement (SLA).
The IT organization creates an SLA with the collaboration and input of other departments. Included in a comprehensive SLA is a defined path for incident priorities, escalation paths and response times.
When an incident occurs, it is identified and logged in a ticketing system so a record is kept. Ideally, the ticket will be updated along the way as the team works to resolve the issue.
The ticket is categorized according to type. For example, the ticket might be defined as a server issue or a networking issue.
High-priority issues are prioritized above other issues based on the significant financial impact they have on the business. Low-priority issues are ones that have minimal financial impact and thus are typically resolved after high and medium priority issues.
An escalation process is used when the team receiving the alert needs to call in assistance from other groups in the organization, requires a level expertise that is not available within the core incident response team or is unable to resolve the issue on their own.
By using messaging between team members along with pre-established runbooks and monitoring solutions, IT professionals are able to rapidly investigate and diagnose the incident.
Once the issue has been diagnosed, it can be resolved and service levels can return to their expected level of performance.
The incident is reported as closed, typically through the ticketing system.
By bringing in a step for reflection on the process, teams are able to review the processes and steps they took to resolve the issue and see what can be done better next time.
Each of these steps is important in the creation of a clear incident management process. Skipping the steps in an attempt to resolve the issue more quickly can easily lead to overwhelming IT teams and hurting SLAs.
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