Incident Response (IR) is the organized set of actions a team takes to identify, contain, eradicate, and recover from security incidents. If you’re asking what is Incident Response, think of it as your playbook for bad days—so you reduce dwell time, limit blast radius, and restore operations with confidence.
We often see leaders formalize IR to align legal, comms, IT, and security around clear roles, SLAs, and decision paths. Good IR plans are rehearsed (tabletop exercises), integrated with EDR/SIEM tooling, and backed by forensics and crisis communications. What matters most is clarity: who does what, in what order, and how evidence and notifications are handled.
Core phases typically include:
- Preparation: Policies, tooling, training, and exercises.
- Detection & Analysis: Validate alerts, scope impact, preserve evidence.
- Containment & Eradication: Isolate systems, remove malware, close gaps.
- Recovery: Restore services safely and verify integrity.
- Lessons Learned: Post-incident review and control improvements.
Our take? IR turns chaos into a controlled process—protecting customers, brand, and continuity.
Want the full breakdown? Explore our Incident Response (IR) Guide for playbooks, roles, and testing methods. For the bigger picture on resilience and evolving threats, see our report Rethinking Security in the Digital Age.
