Incident Response Preparedness: Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Overview | Detection Engineering | Technical IR Readiness | 3rd Party Vendor Management | 3rd Party Partners & Retainers | Managing Executives in a Crisis | Reporting Readiness | Final Thoughts
As I’ve walked through the six critical capabilities every incident response (IR) program needs, one thing should become clear: having an incident response plan or even detailed playbooks alone won’t prepare you for every crisis. Phil Venables, former CISO of Google, recently echoed this point…spot on. You cannot anticipate every attack scenario, every threat vector, or every path an attacker might take. The landscape changes daily.
What you can do is focus on the “big rocks”; the common elements that appear across most incidents. Document clear procedures and expectations, and, most importantly, practice them frequently, even in smaller, controlled scenarios. When I ran a security operations team for a Fortune 500 company, we embedded IR into business-as-usual wherever possible:
Frequent threat hunts and scenario-based exercises
Using out-of-band communications to practice coordination even on minor incidents
Establishing clear SOC to IR handoffs
Running table-top exercises with Cyber, Technology teams, executives, and even the board
Despite this rigor, we still missed things. When unexpected incidents arose, we pivoted quickly, updated our documentation, and conducted thorough after-action reviews. This cycle of practice, assessment, and improvement is essential.
Incident Response must become business as usual (BAU)
For organizations without large internal security teams, leveraging trusted third parties is critical. Whether it’s augmenting ongoing operations or fully managing incident response when an event occurs, external expertise can help you build readiness in manageable, measurable steps. Remember, though, when you’re lean, you still have a job to do when an incident occurs and it is worth considering having someone on retainer that can step in to be that incident manager to coordinate the vendors, the partners, the executives, and the reporting.
Incident response is not achieved overnight. But by breaking it into actionable milestones, practicing consistently, and learning from each incident, you improve your organization’s posture, protect your customers, provide clearer guidance to executives, and ultimately deliver greater value to investors and stakeholders. The goal is not perfection; it's preparedness and resilience.
If you’d like some guidance in building out these capabilities, schedule a consultation with CipherNorth today.