Introduction IT incidents can cost between $2,300 to $9,000 per minute depending on your company’s size and industry.
That translates to over $1 million for a two-hour outage. While lost revenue is a great reason to prevent incidents and improve response—money is not the only thing lost during a disruption. Other tangible costs include company reputation and employee morale, especially if devastating incidents are a frequent occurrence. It’s arguably easier to recoup revenue than the good faith of your customers and employees.
With that said, incidents and downtime are as inevitable as the common cold. You can sneeze into your elbow, wash your hands, or live in a bubble—eventually you’re going to get sick. However, if you take simple precautions like handwashing, and eating well—you can likely decrease the frequency and duration that you’re ill. The same is true for incidents, eventually something will go down. But just as we have handwashing, medicines, and soups to protect our (human) health, we have strategies to protect the health of your services, systems, and infrastructure.
The key to reducing incident frequency and duration begins with the preparation. What constitutes an incident? Who will respond to that incident? How will customers be notified? Should some incidents be escalated sooner than others?
As your organization grows, an informal incident management process will not cut it. You can’t protect millions in revenue and keep quality employees if you’re still leveraging an ad-hoc phone tree in the year 2021. At the same time, setting up a formal incident management process can be intimidating. That’s why we’ve created this guide.
We want to help teams like yours get started with a formal incident management process. In addition to easy-to-follow steps and templates we’ve included no-nonsense advice from real-life IT incident managers to inform your process. This guide is designed for those just beginning or scaling a formal incident management process.
