What is Automated Incident Management and Why is it a Must?

automated incident management

Key takeaways

  • When an incident management system is upgraded by using automation or AI, it helps streamline the process.
  • Automating your incident management process makes detection faster and easier, reduces the time taken for processing, and makes the management process transparent and trackable.
  • The broader steps involved in the process are identification, prioritization, response, and resolution.
  • Cflow is a perfect choice for businesses to automate incident management. The tool is reliable, adaptable, and scalable. 

What is Incident Management?

Incident management is a process that entails adopting a series of actions to manage all the unprecedented incidents that happen in an organization. This is done to remove the interruption and restore the flow of the functions in the organization. The ultimate goal is to resolve incidents as early as possible, and hence a systematic approach is set up to deal with this. On the whole, the incident management process can be divided into four simple steps:

  • Incident identification and logging
  • Incident categorization
  • Incident prioritization
  • Incident response

Table of Contents

What is Automated Incident Management? 

When an incident management system is upgraded by using automation or AI, it helps in the end-to-end streamlining of the process. An initiating action, like a ticket being created indicating an issue, will initiate the complete process of incident management.

When automation is implemented, critical and threatening events are detected quickly and attended to with high efficiency and smoothness. Time-consuming tasks are enhanced, bringing down incident response time allowing the organization to manage incidents faster, and enabling your workforce to invest their expertise in more high-value tasks.

Attaining efficiency in the business processes is not the only advantage. In this era of increased cyber attacks and crimes, an automated system like incident management saves you from the pitfalls of cyber attacks. With an automated incident management tool, there is a high possibility of issues being detected and resolved faster. In the absence of incident management software here are some of the challenges that you may face:

  • Lack of effective integration between employees, business processes, and the different systems like security, Customer Relationship Management, and Human resources. 
  • Inability to stay ahead of cyber attackers and their sophisticated tools
  • Inconsistent workflows that increase the possibility of inefficiency
  • Unable to detect several false positives which leads to unnecessary panic and chaos.

An automated incident response detects, investigates, and nullifies all types of attacks and breaches and aggressively reduces the impact of these risks on the functions of the organization. This process is called Assess and Mitigate.

This process has been done by humans for several decades, and now this is possible to be achieved using workflow management software. Incident automation has removed the human element making the management process more accurate, faster, and effective. 

Role of Automation in Incident Response

Automated incident management has a strong grip over the risk-regulating process. The value and insight-depth automation offers your users and business are innumerable. There is persistence and stability brought into the process and the process will be carried out seamlessly.

Let us look at some of the benefits incident management automation has to offer you.

1. Faster Detection and Resolution

The primary advantage of automation is speed. It detects and resolves incidents much faster than the manual practice. As human intervention is erased with automation, you can effectively reduce the Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

2. Reduced Time

As the complete process is improved and sped up, a huge amount of time is saved. Incident response is carried out instantly and no delay is created in the process. 

3. Empower the Workforce to Focus on Resolving Incidents

Consider this, in a regular and traditional setup, the lead agents have to perform double data entry which makes it extremely difficult, delayed, and error-prone. This is where incident management automation gains significance. It eliminates the process of your employees needing to jump from one app to another to meet the ends of different functions.

Instead, they are empowered when software can carry out different tasks faster. A workflow platform like Cflow has the potential to easily navigate the incident process and simultaneously integrate with multiple applications, systems, etc.

4. Transparency and Trackability

Without an automated system, your employees will likely be engaged in firefighting rather than in productive work, which costs them valuable time and energy. Effective communication is crucial while handling multiple tickets simultaneously.

Your organization’s important factors like executives, managers, and the ticket initiator have to be notified of the status of the request initiated. This can be taken care of by automation. It offers deep transparency where your employees have to track the progress of the ticketed issue.

Here is how it works — when an employee registers a ticket, they will get regular automated notifications through email regarding the status of the ticket at every stage. Hence, there is no interruption to the process, and the employee can access and assess the progress regularly.

5. Offers a Competitive Edge

As the efficiency of the incident management process increases, more and more issues can be easily tackled by your organization. This helps in restoring the flow of the processes quite quickly. Hence, you gain a competitive advantage and excel over your competitors.

6. Fewer False positives

When you implement incident management, both useful and non-useful alerts/risks arise. Among these most of them turn out to be false-positive notifications, which often lead to unnecessary panic and alert fatigue. An automated system will automatically take charge of the right ones with proper analysis, and direct them to the right person for further handling. This successfully saves valuable time and other resources. 

7. Less room for human error

In an automated system, there is less human interaction. Due to this, there is no room for any mistakes caused by human negligence or disloyalty factors affecting the resolution process. In certain cases, the status of the process is updated manually and errors can occur. In an automated incident response, there is no manual handling of any tasks, allowing your employees to focus on work that demands human intelligence.

8. Evolving threat landscape

Threats are evolving and becoming more sophisticated every day. Apart from the new threats, there are existing threats that need to be resolved too. Manually dealing with them would be an uphill task. When you automate incident response, you will have the ability to secure your organization from evolving threats. 

9. Overwhelmed security teams

With numerous cyber threats coming in continually, fatigue brews within the security team. They will have to persistently manage all of the tickets simultaneously increasing the complexity of the process. This overload of work also creates space for errors and drawbacks in the resolving process. However, using an automated incident response system heightens the effectiveness of handling the threat management process. 

10. Better results

The overall productivity of incident management is elevated giving you the best results possible. Automation reduces response times as well as the workload of your employees. The registration, initiation, and resolution can all be done by the automated system so that your employees will not have to constantly review the progress of the process. The threats are detected at an early stage which reduces the complexity of the management process.

11. Reduced costs

Automation is a single-installation solution that you can rely on. Most of the tools, like Cflow, are flexible in nature and can easily adapt to the changing standards of automation. Therefore, you will only have to invest only once in an automation tool. Automated incident management increases accuracy, speed, security, and efficiency and simultaneously lowers the cost you need to plow money into. 

5 Steps to Automate Incident Management Process

Automating an Incident Management Process can be achieved in five simple steps. Let us take a look at them. 

Step 1: Create an Incident Management Workflow

The first step of your incident management process automation is to create an incident management workflow. The workflow depicts the life cycle, which explains the step-wise stages of the entire process, that explains what happens at every stage. A workflow acts as a framework for your incident management team to efficiently work. The commonly involved steps in this workflow are as follows:

  • Identification
  • Prioritization
  • Response
  • Resolution

These stages may not be similar for all organizations. An incident management workflow can be customized according to the different needs of the hour. To build an effective workflow for incident management, it is essential to survey the employees to gather their insights and opinions regarding the different steps and tasks that go behind the process. Such a workflow will lend you a proper vision of the outcome of the process as well. Cflow provides this space for businesses where they can visualize their organizational processes with clarity. 

Step 2: Prioritization and Standardization of Incidents

The second step in the process is about the approach that you take to go ahead with the process. To decide on the resolution approach, the first step is to understand the severity and the root cause of the incident, and then determine the priority sequence of the received incidents using a priority matrix. Having a system like this lets your organization collect risk data that defines fixed standards of prioritization and can be used for future incident management processes too. 

Step 3: Automation of Runbook

What is a runbook? A runbook, also known as a playbook, is a document that holds information on the step-by-step process of any task. This reduces the burden of burning your energy while deciding on the tackling process every time an incident is ticketed. Automating your runbook takes a few steps ahead by saving you time and simultaneously making the process standardized. The runbooks can also be incorporated into the incident management workflow that you have created on an automated incident management tool.

Step 4: Collect Data for Retrospection

Incident management is a recurring process. Hence, collecting real-time data is crucial to maintain the proper flow of business. To have clear retrospectives for future management, it is ideal for your team to collect data and store it effectively. Data collection has to be done from the moment an incident is reported followed by alerting procedures like contacting people, classification, and prioritization of incidents. Saving data is beneficial later for retrospections. 

Step 5: Optimize the Process by Integrating with other Applications

The incident management process takes place in collaboration with several other third-party applications. These applications can be a security tool, data storage software, etc. Integrating all these apps using an automation platform like Cflow will enhance the speed of the process and aid in the improvement of productivity as well. Our platform can collect and store data, retrieve data anytime anywhere, provide data security, and integrate with multiple third-party applications seamlessly.

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Automated Incident Management Examples

The severity of the incidents can vary greatly. It is always essential to have a hold on detecting the type of issue and the apt solution to it. An automated incident management system comes in handy during several instances of going astray. Hence, here are four situations where business organizations can effectively use automated incident management solutions.

A Bug Impacting the Customer Experience

Any technical issue that interrupts the working of any process efficiently has to be dealt with immediately to restore the flow. When you have an automated incident management system in place, here is how the issue is overcome

  1. Firstly, when an employee faces a bug, the workflow for incident management is initiated by filing a ticket. During this step, the person is responsible for providing information regarding the issue and its importance in a small descriptive manner that the security team can clearly understand. The employee should also mention the customers it will impact. 
  2. Then the process is taken over automatically by the automated system where the text is interpreted followed by the system asking for the consent of the user to move it to engineering, which will further take care of the ticket.
  3. Once the ticket is automatically moved to the escalated tickets category, the respective stakeholders will divert them to a separate channel that is exclusively meant for handling the bug problem. 
  4. When the ticket moves from one stage to the other, the status of the flow, the status can be updated accordingly at the final stage when the issue is attended to and resolved. As the ticket is cleared, the agent can close the ticket the employee who initiated gets notified automatically. 

A Printer Connectivity Issue

These issues can be resolved without any human involvement. Issues like these are simple and straightforward, and not critical in nature. Organizations can use runbook automation to optimize the process. 

Automatic Firewall Updates

The security team can use automation to update the organization’s firewall where specific IP addresses will be detected automatically and dealt with. You can automate tasks like collecting forensic data, removing corrupted systems, and regular vulnerability scans to achieve this.

Block Communications with Malicious Domains

Most often unknown and malicious domains often clog and block the effective flow of work. They must be blocked to investigate this intrusion. The automated incident management system can do these actions faster and gradually move from detection to resolution. 

Investigation of Breach

Repetitive tasks like log reviews and data analysis have to be done while investigating a breach. Automation tools have the feature of log management and can be stored on the cloud. Information can be delivered in a compiled and comprehensive format. 

Why Choose Cflow as your Automated Incident Management Tool? 

Considering the complexity of the process, choosing an incident management tool is a big decision for organizations. The ideal option would be to incorporate different tools to ensure a secure process. However, investing in different tools might not be cost-efficient. Hence, it is necessary to look for a tool that could offer solutions to all the management areas that you tend to attend. Cflow is one such tool that can cater to your several needs constructively. Regardless of the tool’s specialization, Cflow can ensure the following things:

1. Reliability

Cflow is one of the most reliable incident management tools in the market. Cflow well handles the security of the process. 

2. Transparency and Accessibility

Cflow provides a deep sense of clarity and transparency to the process. The accessibility is flexible as well. It can be restrictive or open based on the preference of the organization. 

3. Adaptability

As a flexible and scalable tool, Cflow can effectively upgrade itself to the changing standards of any industry. Customization is an important feature that Cflow offers. Our no-code platform can be easily altered and used with ease. 

Final Thoughts

The incident management process is complex where risks and issues are recurring events that influence the working of any organization. The two ultimate parameters of a business, brand image and success, are in jeopardy and depend on how well you manage your ticketed incidents and avoid risks. Considering an automated incident management tool is the best solution step you can take forward.

Cflow is a seamless platform that can do it for you. Sign up today and experience the efficiency. 

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