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Why Your Incident Response Plan Is Probably Wrong (And How to Fix It)

#security #devops #productivity #operations

Most incident response plans I review for small teams have the same five problems. Here's how to fix each one.

Problem 1: It's 47 Pages Long

Nobody reads a 47-page document during an incident. Nobody reads it before an incident either.

Fix: Your IR plan should fit on one page. Severity levels, escalation contacts, and the first three steps for each severity. That's it. Everything else goes in appendices that people reference after the fire is out.

Problem 2: No Severity Matrix

"Everything is urgent" means nothing is. Without a severity matrix, every incident triggers the same response — which means your team burns out on SEV4s and misses real SEV1s.

Fix: Define four levels:

  • SEV1: Business down. Page everyone. War room.
  • SEV2: Major feature broken. Page on-call. Start investigation.
  • SEV3: Minor feature broken. Ticket. Fix next sprint.
  • SEV4: Cosmetic. Backlog. Fix when convenient.

Each level has clear escalation authority — who gets paged, who makes the call to roll back, who communicates with customers.

Problem 3: No Communication Templates

During an incident, someone has to write a customer email, a Slack update, and a status page post — all while debugging the actual problem. The result is either no communication or panicked, unprofessional communication.

Fix: Pre-write templates for each severity level:

Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Fill in the blanks. Send. Go back to fixing the problem.

Problem 4: No Tabletop Exercises

A plan that's never been tested is a hypothesis. The first time you run a tabletop exercise, you'll discover that your escalation contact left the company six months ago.

Fix: Run five scenarios:

  1. Ransomware on the file server
  2. Business email compromise (BEC)
  3. Insider data exfiltration
  4. Lost laptop with admin credentials
  5. Third-party vendor breach

Each takes 30 minutes. Pizza helps.

Problem 5: No Containment Checklists

"Disconnect the machine" means different things on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Your team will waste precious minutes Googling commands during an incident.

Fix: OS-specific containment checklists:

Linux: ip link set eth0 down or nmcli device disconnect eth0
macOS: networksetup -setairportpower en0 off
Windows: netsh interface set interface "Ethernet" disable

Print them. Tape them to the wall.

The Fix

If your team has no IR plan, start with the First 30 Minutes checklist — it's free and covers the essential first steps.

For teams that want the full toolkit — one-page IR plan template, severity matrix, comms templates, containment checklists, and five tabletop exercises — the Ops Starter Kit has everything for $19.64.

When was the last time you tested your incident response plan? What broke?

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