Incident Response Plan: The 6 Phases for Better IT Security

An airtight incident response plan is key for any organization that wants to keep its IT environment safe. Without one, the risk of data breaches and other cyberattacks increases significantly, which can quickly become costly.

We’ve prepared this guide to help your organization create an incident response plan to keep you prepared for anything. e’ll go through the six phases of creating an incident response plan, including:preparation, identification, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident learning.

For each phase of the plan, we’ve included action items that can help you implement an incident response plan for your own organization. 

What is an incident response plan?

An incident response plan is a written plan that helps IT departments deal with cybersecurity incidents like cyberattacks or data breaches. It should include details like how to prepare for incidents, steps for identifying them, and strategies for recovering operations to normal.

Why create an incident response plan?

The benefits of creating and maintaining a good incident response plan include:

1. Preventing data breaches

Any incident, no matter how small or big, can escalate into a data breach, which can generating significant costs for organizations—something every organization wants to avoid . According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach in 2024 was a hefty $4.88 million.. A good incident response plan can help to prevent accumulating these kinds of costs.

2. Detecting data breaches more quickly

Not only does a security incident plan help prevent data breaches, but it’s also meant to facilitate faster detectiondet. On average, it takes organizations 197 days to identify a data breach and 69 days to contain it. 

With incident management tools like Atera, this process can be sped up significantly. Tapping into these kind of  tools enables your organization to monitor your network activity in real time and obtain critical alerts about any potential issues. 

3. Maintaining brand reputation

Cybersecurity incidents tend to become very public and are a huge turn-off for customers. Vercara’s research found that 75% of US consumers would stop purchasing from a brand if it suffered a cyber-attack. Cybersecurity attacks put customers’ data at risk, and impact trust. 

4. Identifying the root cause of an attack

Good incident response planning includes root cause analysis, which helps outline the source of problems and events. An incident response plan also prescribes measures to address the root cause and suggests questions that can be asked to gain insights from the underlying issue. This is important for preventing future incidents and strengthening the current security posture.

How to create an incident response plan in 6 steps

The SANS Institute released the Incident Handler’s Handbook in 2011, which has acted as an industry standard for incident response. While new technologies like AI and automation have changed how organizations detect, respond, and manage incidents, the core principles remain the same.

The six core principles of an incident response plan are:

1. Prepare for incidents
2. Identify potential incidents
3. Contain to prevent further damage
4. Eradicate and remove the root cause
5. Recover operations to normal
6. Learn by doing a post-incident review

This cyclical process ensures that your organization not only responds to incidents but also prevents them in the first place. Here’s a a detailed breakdown of the steps included in an incident response plan:

1. Prepare for incidents

As the name implies, the preparation stage involves preparing your IT team to be able to handle incidents. Incidents range from minor phishing attempts and malware infections to large-scale data breaches, and your team should be ready to handle them at any scale.

To prepare for incidents, ask yourself:

• What policies are in place? If you don’t have any in place, now’s time to draft and implement them. Your policies should outline key procedures, responsibilities, and guidelines for communication.
• What tools will be used? The best—if not the only—way to manage incidents is to use an incident management tool. These tools assist with network monitoring, ticket handling, patch management, and more.
• Who is responsible? Assemble your incident response team and decide each individual’s role and responsibilities. If you don’t have the resources for this internally, you can consider using MDR software.
• Where is the incident documented? If the worst case happens and the incident is considered a criminal act, documentation can be used as evidence. Even if this is not the case, documenting an incident is important if you want to learn from it. You can use IT documentation software to accomplish this more effectively.
• Is the staff trained for incident response? While your IT team should fully understand incident response, it’s a good idea if everyone in your organization has a general idea of what it entails. Provide training materials and educate your staff about your incident response plan.

2. Identify potential incidents

The identification phase starts when your organization has detected an incident, and you need to decide how to respond to it. To get to this point, you need to gather events from various sources, such as error messages, log files, firewalls, and other resources.

The best EDR, XDR, SIEM, and incident management tools can facilitate this by using machine learning and AI to gather data from various events. Once these tools identify suspicious behavior, they automatically alert you to any potential issues.

At this stage, your incident response team should document all actions taken. These reports should answer the “Who, What, Where, Why, and How” questions related to the incident.

3. Contain to prevent further damage

Containment to prevent further damage is one of the most important phases of your incident management plan. During this phase, the incident response team focuses on mitigating the incident’s impact. To understand what’s happening, it’s critical to examine your systems monitoring tool and take the required actions.

Based on the situation, you have the option of taking short or long-term containment actions:

1. Short-term containment – to limit damage as early as possible.

This can include isolating networks or taking down an infected production server. Short-term containment is not meant to be a long-term solution to the problem; its intent is to prevent further damage from occurring. 

1. Long-term containment – to start fixing the root issue.

Long-term containment often includes making temporary fixes, such as implementing access controls on affected systems to allow them to remain operational while a clean system is rebuilt. The purpose of this phase is to remove any accounts or backdoors used by attackers and put preventative measures in place.

Before making any temporary changes to your system, you should conduct a system backup. Note that this wcan be done automatically with Atera’s backup tool.

4. Identify the root cause and eradicate

While the previous phase focused on mitigating further damage, this one focuses on removing and repairing affected systems.

This phase involves taking the following steps:

1. Find the root cause of the issue. Determine how the incident occurred by looking at alerts and system logs, reviewing network traffic, and tracing the entry point of the attack. This helps to understand and address weaknesses in your security posture.

2. Remove malware or threats. Eliminate all malicious software, files, or unauthorized access points from your systems. This can be done with the help of antivirus software, which keeps your systems malware-free.

3. Deploy security patches. If a system vulnerability is exposed, it should be patched immediately. The best way to do this is withan automated patch management tool likeAtera—which lets you deploy security patches for Windows, Linux, and macOS devices.

As with all the previous phases, this one should be documented to determine the overall impact an incident has on your organization.

5. Recover operations to normal

The recovery phase includes carefully bringing systems back online to prevent a repeat of the incident. During this phase, make sure the systems going back into production are tested, monitored, and validated so they are not reinfected by malware.

During this phase, you should consider things like:

• Duration of monitoring to detect any abnormalities
• Strategies to verify that systems are operational and secure
• Time and date for restoring operations

While this phase could have many goals, the main aim is to prevent another incident from occurring for the same reasons as the previous one.

6. Learn by doing a post-incident review

The main purpose of doing a post-incident review is to prevent incidents from happening in the future. To assist with post-incident review, you can create an IT security incident report.

While our detailed guide outlines how to create an IT security incident report, below is a simple breakdown of what to include in your post-incident report: 

• What happened during the cyber attack?
• When did the breach happen, and when was it resolved?
• Who was involved in identifying and mitigating the security breach?
• What was the response to the security breach?
• Did the response work, or were there any gaps or failures?
• What assets were impacted and what happened to them?
• How was the organization affected?
• What can be done to prevent future breaches?
• What other lessons can be learned from the breach?

Based on the learnings from your post-incident report, you can take more informed and effective steps to prevent future cyberattacks. 

These can include offering additional security training, incorporating new cybersecurity tools, updating existing policies, and improving response procedures.

How Atera can assist with incident management and response

One of the ways to manage and respond to incidents is to use an IT management solution like Atera. It combines key IT management capabilities in one platform, assisting IT teams in preventing, detecting, and responding to incidents. Plus, Atera integrates with leading cybersecurity solutions, like Bitdefender, ThreatDown, Cynet, and more.

To help with incident management, Atera’s key capabilities include:

• Patch management: Prevent incidents from occurring in the first place with Atera’s patch management tool. Automatically deploy security patches into Windows, Linux, and macOS devices.
• Real-time monitoring and alerts: Stay on top of your system activity using Atera’s RMM tool. Resolve incidents quickly and receive alerts when critical hardware or performance conditions occur.
• Remote access: Access devices,  remotely . configure systems, troubleshoot issues, and resolve incidents without the need for on-site visits—all with Atera’s remote access tool
• IT ticketing: Create, assign, and manage end-user support tickets within Atera’s ticketing system—powered by AI to summarize and respond to tickets faster and more efficiently.
• Security integrations: Further enhance IT security through Atera’s cybersecurity integrations. You can find integrations with leading antivirus, backup, EDR, MDR, and XDR tools.
• Network discovery: Perform regular network scans with Atera’s network discovery tool. This helps to detect any potential issues and anomalies within your network.
• Reporting and analytics: Demonstrate industry compliance and make better decisions with insights from Atera’s reporting. Reports can be customized and automatically sent to your email.
• AI: Improve your IT department’s  efficiency with Atera ‘s AI Copilot—which troubleshoots devices, diagnoses issues, and resolves tickets in a few clicks. , 

The best part? You get all of the above features under one roof when using Atera’s all-in-one IT management platform.
If you’d like to take a test drive of Atera and try out its features to improve your incident management, you can do so with a 30-day free trial.