Preparing Credible Incident Response Plans

By Author: Gant Redmon
Total Articles: 4
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It is good for any business to analyze its preparedness in handling security incidents in the IT department or administrator. In the contrary, however, many organizations learn how to respond to security incidents only after suffering an IT security breach.

It is good for any business to analyze its preparedness in handling security incidents in the IT department or administrator. In the contrary, however, many organizations learn how to respond to security incidents only after suffering an IT security breach. Poor incident response plans to such attacks or general unpreparedness are much more costly and disastrous. Proper incident response plans should be an integral part of your overall security policy and your business’s risk mitigation strategy.

Contrary to common belief, having effective security incident response strategies can have some indirect financial benefits. Before you start thinking of the incident response plans as a liability to your business, stop to consider the insurance advantages of such an investment. In essence, there are certain insurance companies that offer great discounts to clients ...
... who can demonstrate that their organizations or businesses have cost-effective mechanisms of handling an IT security breach. Apart from that, having formal incident response plans can help a service provider win business. This stands to show that your business takes seriously matters security.

Here are some of the recommended processes and procedures in responding to an IT security breach or any other kind of intrusions identified in a small- to medium-based (SMB) network environment. These procedures and processes tackle the issue of forming a reliable incident response team at your company and also define what a credible security incident response plan should entail.
Firstly, your organization should be able to minimize the number or better still severity of the security incidents. This is all in an effort to minimize the impact of the attack and hence minimize losses as much as possible.

Secondly, you ought to move swiftly in assembling the Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) and define the incident response plans that you intend to execute in tackling the IT security breach.

Finally, you ought to carefully and quickly contain the damage by exploiting the necessary security incident response strategies in order to minimize the risks.

There are quite a number of system administrators who spend a lot of their time in network environments, and hence are very familiar with networks. They are capable of documenting the environments and have stable backups in place. There should always be an auditing process already in place to monitor performance. There should be some awareness creation before implementing an incident response team in the IT department.

No matter how knowledgeable you are about the network environment, processes and standards, the risk of getting an IT security breach remains. Any credible security incident response strategies should clearly draw out details on how to respond to various types of IT security attacks.

The rule of thumb in securing your IT department is ensuring that your system is always prevented from any form of IT security breach at all times. As it is in most areas of life, prevention is better than cure. Although, it is almost impossible to prevent all security incidents, it is vital to have credible security incident response plans in place so as to minimize the impact of the IT security breach as much as possible.
Resource: http://www.co3sys.com/blog/author/Jennifer%20Troisi