Incident management, sometimes referred to as Critical Incident Management entails returning IT systems or service back to normal as quickly as possible after an incident, so as to avoid or minimise the effects of the incident as much as possible. This is achieved by building temporary workarounds (contingency plans) into business processes that enable service to continue while the problem is being resolved.
Incidents occur in varying degrees, that is why it is important to adopt and maintain a culture of collaboration rather than silos in order to ensure that appropriate and timely responses to incident plans are carried out. It is important therefore that incident prevention and planning as well as incident response be included in the process of formulating the plans, because as stated above, the idea is to not reach the incident response stage but rather to prevent incidents from occurring.
An incident may be deemed critical in nature if: it affects the safety to life of employees; other stakeholders of an organisation; if it leads to the disruption of some or all business operations; can be considered to be a crime; could potentially damage the reputation of the institution. Examples of critical incidents are:
• Hazardous material exposure
• Civil unrest
• Computer viruses
• Infrastructure outage(power, network, interruption of deliveries)
• Critical injury
• Fire
• Infectious disease, e.g. COVID-19
• Severe weather
