6 Things You Need in an IT Incident Management Platform

Your incident management process is greatly impacted by the tools you have available. And technology is key when it comes to gaining visibility and obtaining contextual data. You need tools to send alerts when incidents arise, as well as track activity for compliance reporting purposes. Whether you’re in healthcare, information technology or work at a small MSP – you need a robust incident management platform that gives you results and helps mitigate MTTR. It’s imperative to deploy a proactive solution for your response teams.

So, how do you choose the right incident management solution for your organization? To help you find the best one for you, we’ve given you a checklist of platform attributes that you should look to as a baseline for your IMS platform.

Monitoring & alerting – To catch security incidents early and accurately, you need to have behavior-based monitoring set up. This will allow you to realize system threats and failures immediately. This way, as soon as something goes wrong from a security perspective, response teams will receive an alert.

Secure messaging – Secure messaging allows you to communicate important information that may be privileged. SSL encrypted messaging capabilities will allow you to send those messages that can only be viewed by the recipient.

Real-time Message status – It’s imperative to know the status of the messages being deployed from the console. Find a platform that shows the status of the message/alert with a time-stamps in an audit trail with message logs. Using one that does not offer this means dealing with “I didn’t get the message” excuses from response team members.

Escalation & redundancies – Not all people get their incident messages. Why? Because they are not manning their email or smartphone 24/7. Find a platform that offers escalation and redundancies. If one alert is not received by the recipient in a preselected time, the alert escalates to another team member. Redundancies will ensure that messages not only go to the platform app, but it will also go to their email, text and phone as well.

Reporting – Real-time reporting will allow your team and stakeholders to view response times around an incident alert. You will also have transparency into how many alerts go unanswered, which will help you optimize workflows by seeing trends through data visualization.

Smart scheduling – Find a platform that allows for smart scheduling and keeps your team ‘in the know’. Schedule the on-call team as a group or as individuals. Automate alerts that come in through the scheduler that alerts people based on their availability. A great incident management platform also allows you to use smart scheduling to implement failover capabilities so no message is lost.

Choosing the right incident management platform comes down to what will work with the DevOps tools you already have in place. From there, you can get serious about your requirements, specifically for monitoring, alerting, and compliance — areas that no organization can ignore in today’s business climate. Choose tools that integrate easily and enable your teams to meet business and security goals seamlessly and on time. Use these six attributes as a checklist for your next incident management platform and you can’t go wrong!