IT Incident Management for Modern Organizations

When an endpoint is stuck booting up, someone can’t access the network, or customers aren’t able to log in, IT services springs into action, working to fix the problem as quickly as possible. A firefighting approach to address these issues works in the moment, but over time, it’s dragging down operational efficiency and increasing the odds that the same issues recur.

That’s where an IT incident management system can help. When your company takes an organized and methodical approach to managing IT incidents, your team works effectively, handling problems as they arise and taking proactive measures to ensure they don’t come back in the future.

What Is IT Incident Management?

Incident management is a defined process for identifying, analyzing, and resolving events and outages, AKA incidents, while maintaining normal service and minimizing the impact on the business. An incident can be anything from a server outage to a security breach, but the end goal is always the same: resolve incidents and get back to business as usual as quickly as possible.

Incident vs. Service Request

A service request is when a user asks for something routine, like needing access, information, or a resource. These requests are generally not caused by something else, like a service outage, but are a part of daily operations with a set procedure for resolving the request.

An incident is almost always unplanned and disruptive, interfering with business operations while impacting internal and external users. The unplanned nature and negative impact of an incident make resolving it more urgent, partly because there may not be a set procedure to fix the incident. The team often needs to investigate what’s happening and create a solution on the fly.

For example, a user asks IT to install a Microsoft product on their laptop. This is a service request because it’s not caused by a system failure. The user is asking for access to something that’s known and likely preapproved for use, and IT has a standard procedure to fulfill this request.

But if a user contacts IT and reports that their laptop won’t boot after a recent update, this is an incident because it’s unplanned, disruptive, and requires quick action to restore the device.

Incident vs. Problem

While it may seem like an incident and a problem are the same thing, incident management classifies incidents and problems differently.

An incident is (usually) a single problem. The unplanned interruption reduces services, and the goal of incident response management is to restore that service as quickly as possible without investigating the root cause. Ideally, fixing the issue resolves the problem, and it doesn’t return.

A problem is larger and often causes a cascade of related incidents. One or more users are encountering the same problem, indicating this isn’t a one-off event. In incident management, IT diagnoses the root cause, then corrects it to prevent a recurrence.

So, if a single user can’t connect to the VPN but a reset of their network settings resolves the issue, that’s an incident. It’s resolved, and IT probably doesn’t investigate why the user couldn’t connect. Hopefully, this is a one-time issue, and the reset fixed it.

But if multiple users can’t connect to the VPN, that’s a problem. Now, IT needs to investigate and find the cause of the problem and correct it to ensure everyone can connect.

Types of Incident Management Processes

There are two main styles of incident management processes. One is traditional and structured, while the other is a bit more flexible and agile. Because there’s no one right way to approach incident management, choosing which style to use comes down to organizational goals and the team’s style.

IT-Style Incident Management Process

The IT-style incident management process is a traditional, structured approach to incident management. It’s generally defined by Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) standards, a globally recognized framework of best practices for delivering IT services. Despite being a structured approach to incident management, ITIL is flexible, allowing the team to align its incident management process with business goals.

Most IT-style incident management includes:

• Identification: A user reports an incident, or a tool automatically flags an anomaly.

• Logging: Incidents are logged with key details (time, symptoms, category, etc.) to increase visibility and traceability of the incident across the team.

• Prioritization: Incidents are classified based on urgency and impact on the company.

• Diagnosis: The team determines the cause of the issue.

• Investigation and incident resolution: The root cause of the incident is identified and fixed — even if it’s just a temporary solution.
• Post-incident reporting: Service is restored, and the incident is documented and closed.

Site Reliability Engineering vs. DevOps-Style Incident Management Process

Site reliability engineering (SRE) and DevOps have a similar incident management goal but a slightly different approach to accomplishing it.

Both have a “the builder who built it fixes it” approach, which focuses on automation, collaboration, and accountability:

• Shared ownership: The same team of developers who created or installed whatever is failing is responsible for fixing it.

• Real-time incident response: Instead of routing requests through a ticketing system, incidents are escalated directly to IT using an on-call system.
• Postmortems: After resolving the incident, teams review what happened to identify why something failed, what was missed, and how to prevent recurrence.

The difference between SRE and DevOps incident management processes lies in what incident management tools the team uses and how success is measured:

How IT Incident Management Helps Your Business

No matter the size of your company, a solid incident management process improves how quickly IT responds to incidents. Over time, this allows the team to find patterns in the incidents and their responses, helping them better respond to future incidents.

Faster Resolution

The end goal of all incident management processes is to help the team resolve incidents and problems faster. Knowing exactly who is responsible for what, which steps to try, and what to do when nothing is working helps the team respond efficiently and effectively and get the system back up and running as quickly as possible.

Better User Experience

Incidents affect people as much (or more) than infrastructure. The longer an incident lasts, the more frustration will mount. Incident management ensures issues are caught and resolved early and reduces the likelihood there will be a similar incident in the future. Over time, this transparency and consistency build trust with external and internal end users — like employees — who feel confident that when an incident occurs, it will be addressed and resolved as quickly as possible.

Improves Operational Efficiency

A strong incident management system ensures the right people take the right action at the right time. Documented procedures give the team a step-by-step guide for solving the problem, allowing them to get to work more quickly. Prioritizing and categorizing incidents allows IT to focus on the most critical and urgent matters first instead of treating every incident as a code-red emergency. The centralized tracking and documenting of incidents keeps everyone aligned on goals and informed on progress.

Provides Insights

Recording incidents and documenting solutions does so much more than “just” keep a record of what happened. It turns every incident into data, and that data can drive better, more informed decisions. The team can:

• Discover recurring issues
• Spot weaknesses in procedures
• Identify the processes that create bottlenecks
• Find the root cause of incidents

Over time, these insights can help the team better deploy their resources, improve their incident response time, and reduce the likelihood of future incidents.

Compliance

Whether your organization is subject to voluntary or mandatory compliance regulations, saying you fixed the problem isn’t enough. You have to prove you fixed every incident quickly, correctly, and consistently, and your incident management procedure is the framework for providing that proof with:

• Audit trails. Incident logging ensures every event is tracked from start to finish.

• Defined procedures. Regulatory bodies look for documented, repeatable incident response processes.

• Security posture. When integrated with a patch manager, incident management helps organizations proactively respond to threats that could lead to noncompliance.

Patch Management as Part of IT Incident Management

One defining feature of IT incident management is that it’s reactive, which makes sense. Your team is responding to an issue that’s happening in real-time. Patch management, and more specifically, a patch management tool, is proactive. It deploys and applies critical security patches as they’re available, fixing vulnerabilities before they turn into incidents.

So, while patch management isn’t incident management, it complements and supports incident management, ensuring that you have fewer incidents to respond to.

Adaptiva’s OneSite Patch helps IT services and teams automate patch remediation at scale. Our tools support your IT incident management process and reduce your attack surface. Request a demo today and learn more.