Incident Management

Incident management is the discipline of detecting, containing and resolving disruption while keeping stakeholders informed. It sits inside business continuity management but operates on a much shorter clock: continuity planning is what you decide months ahead, incident management is what you execute in the first hour.

The practices that separate a controlled response from a chaotic one are unglamorous. A severity scale everyone actually agrees on. Named escalation paths that work at 3am. A single incident commander rather than a committee. Pre-written communications so nobody drafts a customer notice under pressure. And a blameless post-incident review that produces owned actions instead of a document.

This section covers severity and triage models, on-call and war-room structures, communication templates, regulatory notification timelines, and post-incident review formats. It links to business continuity plans for the documented response, and to information security management where the incident is a breach rather than an outage.