Get to know the incident response lifecycle

Key Takeaways

• An incident response lifecycle gives teams a structured framework for identifying, managing, and recovering from service disruptions and security incidents

• NIST proposes an incident response of four phases: Preparation; Detection and Analysis; Containment, Eradication, and Recovery; and Post-Event Activity

• Atlassian adopts a seven-stage approach, emphasizing the practical coordination of a live response, from detection and severity assessment to communication, escalation, role assignment, and resolution

• Well-defined communication channels, responsibilities, and escalation procedures help teams coordinate quickly and keep stakeholders informed

• Incident response is a cycle rather than a strictly linear process. Post-incident analysis helps teams address root causes and improve future detection and response

Hang around security and incident management pros long enough, and you’ll notice a pattern. The smartest people in these industries think in cycles, not straight lines.

Why is that? What does that even mean? That means every incident and outage isn’t an isolated event with a beginning and end point (though it may seem like that). Incidents are a learning opportunity.

Just because a service is “operational” again, doesn’t mean your team’s work is over. Post-incident activities should guide the way you plan future roadmaps, changing the way you prepare for future incidents, and informing procedural changes that will prevent incidents from happening in the first place. It’s a never-ending cycle of improvement, and there are a few different ways to think about the various stages, depending on what school of thought you subscribe to.

What is an incident response lifecycle?

Incident response is an organization’s process of reacting to events such as cyberattacks, security breaches, and server downtime.

The incident response lifecycle is your organization’s step-by-step framework for identifying and reacting to a service outage or compromised security.

Atlassian’s incident response lifecycle

1. Detect the incident

Our incident detection typically starts with monitoring and alerting tools, though sometimes we first learn about an incident from customers or team members.

Since incident alerts can originate from different sources, having a solution that integrates a variety of alerting and reporting tools can be the difference between a disjointed, cumbersome response and a cohesive, collaborative one. A solution like Jira Service Management allows teams to customize and filter alerts across all monitoring, logging, and CI/CD tools, ensuring they mobilize quickly around incidents while avoiding alert fatigue. 

2. Set up team communication channels

Once an incident has been detected, set up dedicated communication channels for the response team. The goal at this point is to focus team communication in well-known channels, such as a dedicated Slack channel and a video conference bridge.

Within Jira Service Management, coordinating incident responses can be a smooth process. Not only are teams enabled to communicate in ways that work best for them — like Slack and video conferencing — but communicating with customers becomes easier with automation and customization, too. We'll cover external communication in Step 4.

3. Assess the impact and apply a severity level

Now it’s time to assess the impact of the incident so the team can decide who else to contact and what to communicate to customers and stakeholders. Assigning a severity level not only identifies the impact of the incident, but it also lays the groundwork for resolution plans and external communications. In Jira Service Management, escalating an incident and assigning a severity trigger automates actions and notifications to keep responders on top of resolution progress. 

4. Communicate with customers

We aim to communicate with stakeholders, both internally and externally, as soon as possible. Communicating quickly and accurately helps build trust with customers and the rest of the organization. Customizable communication options allow teams to collaborate in the ways that work best for them while controlling what information is shared with customers and when. Automated replies sent directly from the incident ticket can also save time during the response.

5. Escalate to the right responders

Initial responders often need to bring other teams into the incident by paging them using alerting features in Jira Service Management. Bring responders directly to the incident ticket by grouping related tickets and tagging relevant responders directly on the ticket. This way, notifications are coordinated, and everyone has the full context.

6. Delegate incident response roles

As additional team members join the response, the incident manager assigns them a role. This is where it's helpful to have a proper incident response playbook — developed beforehand — that outlines clear roles and responsibilities. Individuals on the incident response team will be familiar with each role and will know what they’re responsible for doing during an incident.

7. Resolve the incident

An incident is resolved when the current or imminent business impact has ended. At that point, the emergency response process ends, and the team transitions onto any pending cleanup tasks and the postmortem.

Ideally, your incident management solution will maintain a robust incident timeline, as is the case with Jira Service Management. Responders can access crucial incident data afterward and develop a report that helps teams avoid similar incidents in the future and find the root cause. Postmortems can also act as a reliable resource should something similar happen again.

The NIST incident response lifecycle

Another industry standard incident response lifecycle comes from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST. NIST is a U.S. government agency that sets standards and practices for topics such as incident response and cybersecurity.

Like Atlassian, NIST believes that not every incident can be prevented. So it’s best to be prepared:

“Preventive activities based on the results of risk assessments can lower the number of incidents, but not all incidents can be prevented. An incident response capability is therefore necessary for rapidly detecting incidents, minimizing loss and destruction, mitigating the weaknesses that were exploited, and restoring IT services.” 

The NIST incident response lifecycle breaks incident response down into four main phases: Preparation; Detection and Analysis; Containment, Eradication, and Recovery; and Post-Event Activity.

Phase 1: Preparation

The Preparation phase covers the steps an organization takes before an incident occurs to improve readiness and reduce potential impact.

• Develop incident response policies and playbooks.

• Assign team roles and responsibilities.

• Establish communication and escalation channels.

• Configure response tools and centralize logging.

• Create normal activity baselines to help identify unusual behavior.

• Train the incident response team and run practice exercises.

Phase 2: Detection and Analysis

This phase focuses on identifying possible incidents, confirming what happened, and determining how serious the event is.

• Monitor alerts, logs, and system activity.

• Look for precursors that suggest an attack may occur.

• Identify indicators of compromise that show an attack may be underway.

• Validate whether the event is a genuine security incident.

• Determine which systems, accounts, users, networks, or data are affected.

• Assess the incident’s scope, impact, and severity.

Phase 3: Containment, Eradication, and Recovery

This phase limits the damage, removes the threat, and restores affected systems safely.

• Use short-term containment measures, such as isolating infected systems, disabling compromised accounts, or blocking malicious traffic.

• Apply longer-term containment when a complete cleanup cannot happen immediately.

• Remove malware, backdoors, unauthorized accounts, and other threat artifacts.

• Fix the vulnerabilities or misconfigurations that allowed the incident to occur.

• Rebuild systems or restore them from known-clean backups.

• Test system integrity before returning systems to production.

• Use enhanced monitoring to watch for recurring suspicious activity.

Phase 4: Post-Event Activity

The final phase turns the incident into an opportunity to improve future prevention and response.

• Document the incident timeline and response actions.

• Review the cause, impact, and effectiveness of the response.

• Identify gaps in the organization’s security posture and procedures.

• Update policies, playbooks, logging practices, and training.

• Refine detection rules and security controls.

• Track corrective actions to reduce the risk of recurrence.

Comparison of NIST and Atlassian approaches

Incident response for modern DevOps teams

Over the past decade, the DevOps movement has helped teams reshape how they build, deploy, and operate software. Along with that are innovations in how these teams respond to incidents.

The DevOps approach to managing incidents isn’t dramatically different from the traditional steps to effective incident management. DevOps incident management places an explicit emphasis on involving developer teams from the outset—including on-call responsibilities—and assigning work based on expertise rather than job titles.

Incident response and continuous improvement

Something these incident management approaches have in common is that they are not entirely linear. Each of them includes the same basic component parts: ways of defining, detecting, and identifying incidents; ways of quickly responding and taking action to mitigate incidents; and ways of analyzing incidents to improve future detection and response. 

Analyzing an incident after it happens does more than help you understand what went wrong. It also helps you improve future detection and response processes. Constant, continuous learning and improvement is how teams close that cycle.

There are many moving parts to the (nonlinear) incident response process. Keeping track of each step with integrated collaboration and communication tools is easy with an incident management solution like Jira Service Management. Centralize alerts and unify teams with flexibility to respond to and resolve incidents quickly.