Every business needs technology for providing services to their customers. Technology is now involved in every field. Customers get frustrated when they can’t access services. You should try to provide your services with minimal disruption. This is only possible when you can manage the incidents quickly. Incident management will help you in dealing with various incidents. It is very important for every business. In this article, we are going to talk about incident management.

Definition of Incident management:

Incident management is very important for ensuring that you are providing the best value to your customers. According to the ITIL 4, an incident is an interruption to service. Sometimes the reduction in the quality of your service can be defined as an incident. Some of the common examples are:

Customers can’t log in to their system.
Your systems are not responding to commands.
Your network is working slowly.
Hacked or corrupted data.

If you can quickly address incidents, then it will help you in increasing user satisfaction. Not all incidents will be visible to your end-users. However, you still need to focus on solving every incident.

The main aim of incident management is to reduce the negative impact of incidents by restoring your business operations. It is important to quickly detect and resolve incidents. This is the main aim of incident management. You should have a clear understanding of the SLA that you are offering to your customers. It will include the timeline for resolving and responding based on some conditions.

Sometimes incidents will be repeatable and you will know about the causes. In these incidents, you can use incident models for handling them. You can create an incident model for dealing with repeatable incidents. It is a repeatable approach for dealing with particular incidents. These models will help you in reducing the resolution time.

If you can’t find a solution to an incident, then you should apply some workaround. This will help you in reducing the impact of the incident. Also, it will reduce the probability of recurrence. You can use workarounds like reconfigurations or restarts for quickly restoring your services.

Incident management activities

Your IT team needs to perform various activities for restoring your services. These activities will generally follow this order:

Detect the incident

You can’t recover from an incident until you detect it. Thus, you should first focus on incident detection. Your users can report service issues to your IT team. After that, your IT team can verify the issue. You should use alert systems for identifying incident in your network.

Log the incident

You should log every incident that occurs. It is important to store incidents in a special register. This will help you in properly managing the logs. You can track timelines by logging the incidents.

Classify

You should classify the incident into different categories. Make sure that you are classifying the incident according to their type first. You can also classify the incidents according to their impact. This will help you in dealing with serious incidents first. You can also classify the incidents according to their priority. Make sure that you are solving the most important incidents first.

Diagnose

You need to find what has gone wrong in your system. After that, you need to find the fastest way to solve the incident. If you have already dealt with a similar incident, then you can use a previously documented incident for solving this problem. A team is required for dealing with new or complex incidents. You might need to conduct a joint investigation for dealing with new incidents. Also, you should update the classification if you are dealing with a new incident.

Resolve the incident

You need to apply a solution for solving the incident. Sometimes you can use workarounds for solving the problem. However, you should try to permanently fix the problem. If a permanent solution will take more time, then you should use workarounds for resolving the problem.

You can sometimes apply the solution automatically. If the solution is simple, then you can document it to the end-users. They can apply it from their side. Your support team can also help you in resolving the incident. If the incident is complex, then you should forward it to your IT provider.

You should communicate with the stakeholders and affected users. Make sure that they know about the timeline and current status. You might need to trigger your disaster recovery plans in some cases. If it is difficult to resolve some issues, then you should use your Disaster recovery plans.

Close the incident

You should close the incident after solving it. Make sure that you are storing the incident details in your database. You might need confirmation from users and communication before closing the incident. Also, you might need to handle the billing of activities. Sometimes your support team will change the configuration. Thus, you should also update it.

Review

The incident review will help you in dealing with the root cause of the incident. The management can check how the incident was resolved and handled. They can determine what was done wrong. This will help you in protecting your business from future incidents. You might change some activities for protecting yourself from incidents. The review can guide you in other process activities also. You can use it for improving your security management and problem management. It will help you in improving your ITSM practices.

Conclusion

Speed is the most important thing for incident management. Your customers quickly want access to your services. Thus, it is important to minimize the impact of incidents. This can be done by using a successful incident management plan. Make sure that you can quickly detect and respond to incidents. If you don’t have access to a good IT team, then you should work with an MSP. Experienced MSPs like Bleuwire can help you in creating an incident management plan. They will help you in detecting and resolving incidents. Thus, you don’t need to worry about downtime. Your IT provider will help you quickly resolving incidents. If you need more information regarding ITIL, then you can contact Bleuwire.

Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™ services and solutions in how we can help your business.