Are you preparing for an incident management interview? Then this article is for you. It covers different areas of incident management that interviewers commonly test. Read on to understand the best way to answer incident management questions.
1. Define An Incident Management Process?
This is a set of actions and procedures that seeks to respond to and address critical incidents. These procedures and activities include how incidents are discovered and reported, what tools employees should use, who is responsible, and what measures one should follow to solve the problem. Many industries employ incident management processes to address different issues, from IT system failure to situations needing the attention of health experts, to physical infrastructure maintenance.
2. Name Some Common Incidents At The Workplace
Some common examples of incidents that can occur are:
- Employees are unable to access the server because one of the server applications has malfunctioned.
- Some employees cannot connect to the internet and yet they need the internet to perform their daily work.
- Staff cannot print a document because the printer toner has malfunctioned.
- An employee cannot perform work because an office computer cannot run an application.
3. Why Is Incident Management Necessary?
Without incident management, a business risks losing vital data. It may also lose revenues and productivity due to downtime. Even when unexpected occurrences are minimal and cause little long-term impact, IT teams must commit considerable time to research and resolve problems. Incident management is a crucial component for companies and businesses of all sizes and is required to satisfy many data regulatory standards. Incident management guarantees that IT teams can handle vulnerabilities and issues as soon as they arise. Rapid reactions enable businesses to reduce the overall effect of accidents, mitigate damages, and ensure that services and systems continue to operate as intended.
4. What Is A Recurring Incident And How Can It Be Identified?
A recurring incident is repeated in nature. It has a similar root cause or subject as a previous incident. There are several ways to identify such incidents. One can manually review occurrences and mark them as reoccurring if they have similarities with previous incidents. One can manually review incidents and mark them as repeating if they are similar to an earlier incident. This might be any combination of matching fields one considers necessary. Using an incident template may also help to mark something as repeating.
5. How Can Re-Occurring Incidents Be Handled?
By nature, incidents are unpredictable. However, that does not mean a company cannot be prepared enough for them. A great way to solve these incidents efficiently and quickly is to create a plan. The first thing to do when an incident happens again is to determine its root cause. Find out if there is a specific thing that triggers it. If found, one should remove it or try to avoid it whenever possible. The next thing should be to document the steps taken to deal with the incident. That record will act as a reference point for handling the incident whenever it occurs again. Lastly, there is a need to keep track of incident trends. For instance, does an incident occur on a specific day of the week or month? If managers identify some trends, they should take the necessary steps to address the situation.
6. Why Is Real-Time Reporting And Analytics Critical In Incident Management Systems?
Many firms are limited by legislation and compliance frameworks that dictate the period in which they must communicate vital information to workers, clients, partners, or regulatory entities. Real-time reporting and analytics give administrators useful information about the effectiveness of their communications planning and execution. It also helps them to ensure that all industry and government communication regulation requirements are met. Furthermore, to gain a better understanding of potential changes for communications strategies, the most sophisticated incident management solutions allow for the creation of customized reports that are tailored to the needs of each business.
7. State The Steps Involved In Incident Management Process
The incident management process involves five main steps that ensure no aspect is ignored. These steps help teams to respond effectively to incidents. There are:
- Incident identification
- Incident notification
- Investigation and diagnosis
- Resolution and recovery
- Incident closure
8. Incident Identification: What Does It Involve?
Identification of incidents is the initial stage in an incident lifetime. Users report incidents in different ways that a company permits. These include phone calls, self-service, walk-ups, automated notices, support chats, and emails. IT departments can discover some incidents through network monitoring software and system scanning applications. The service desk then determines whether the problem qualifies as an incident or it’s a request. Once they identify an incident, they should record it so that an investigation and classification may start. Categorization is critical to prioritizing response resources and deciding how to handle occurrences.
9. In What Ways Can Businesses Make The Incident Management Process Effective?
Training and supporting employees some effective ways businesses can enhance incident management. Training non-IT staff to identify and report an incident helps IT teams to act faster and spend less time interpreting related reports. Another way is setting alerts that matter. Alert overload can easily lead to overlooking some incidents or prolonged response time. So it is important to set only those alerts that are necessary. Other effective strategies include defining on-call schedules and procedures, establishing communication guidelines, and streamlining chance processes.
10. What Is IT Incident Management?
IT incident management is part of IT service management (ITSM) that involves restoring services as soon as possible after an interruption while minimizing the impact on the company. IT incident management minimizes the lifespan and intensity of interruption caused by incidents and keeps a company ready for unanticipated hardware, software, and security failures. In reality, IT incident management frequently uses temporary workarounds to keep services operational while the IT team looks into the problem, determines its source, and creates and deploys a long-term solution.
11. What Is Meant By ITIL?
ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library. It is one of the established IT service management frameworks. ITIL standardizes the planning, selection, delivery and maintenance, and the entire lifecycle of IT services in a company. Its purpose is to enhance efficiency and ultimately attain a predictable service delivery. IT administrators become business service partners through the ITIL framework instead of being just back-end support personnel. ITIL best practices and guidelines help businesses to aline their needs with the expenses and actions of IT departments.
12. Urgency Of An Incident: What Does This Mean?
This is the function of time. It is based on how fast a business or customer expects the restoration of a service or to be provided with information, update, or something else. Urgency is about time and is usually related to service level targets. The urgency of an incident is dependent on the importance of the affected service or process. Any business puts a high level of urgency on incidents affecting its critical areas. The resources and time needed are important considerations when resolving incidents.
13. How Do You Prioritize Incidents?
Prioritizing involves intersecting the urgency and impact of an incident. An impact involves the number of areas or users affected, while urgency entails how quickly a solution is needed. So, I calculate the impact of a situation and its urgency. Doing this allows me to assign the right priority value to every incident. Incidents that affect critical business areas are highly likely to impact a business significantly. Using the incident priority matrix, I prioritize such incidents and categorize them as urgent.
14. What Does Security Incident Mean?
This constitutes an event that might show that someone has compromised the data or systems of a business or that mechanisms that safeguard them have failed. An information security incident, for example, involves unauthorized disclosure, access, modification, use, or destruction of data. An event becomes a security incident if it is extensive to the extent that it disrupts the normal operations of a business.
15. Name some effective ways to Mitigate and prevent Security Incidents?
There are several mechanisms that businesses can use.
- Security incident detection
One of the first steps toward preventing security incidents is to invest in the right tools and processes to help detect these incidents before they occur or escalate. These tools and processes facilitate detection and help to deploy a quick response before the cause of damage.
- Implement behavior analytics tools
These are important in monitoring user behaviors. Even before the search for any unusual behavior begins, it’s necessary to establish what normal behavior looks like. Once that is done, it becomes easy to spot anomalies such as unauthorized access to servers or critical information.
- Monitor network traffic
A network is a gateway into a company, its data, and its systems. So it should be kept secure to prevent attacks. One of the ways to do that is to monitor both incoming and outgoing network traffic. Businesses should investigate any suspicious or unknown traffic.
16. Explain Two Incident Management Tools
Freshservice is a common tool that allows customers to submit tickets via several channels, such as email, chat, and even through its support site, which serves as a service desk. Freshservice evaluates tickets using intelligence technology and provides the reporter with pertinent articles that can be useful in resolving their reported problem. IT department teams often use this tool because it enables them to respond to tickets automatically, which helps to quicken the incident management procedure.
Another common incident management solution is Resolver. This tool focuses on security issues that affect an organization’s daily operations. Employees may use Resolver to report problems, and executives can address them quickly. Resolver provides additional capabilities including excellent data quality and the capacity to translate languages using artificial intelligence. That is in addition to automating the tasks traditionally involved in incident handling, such as record-keeping.
17. What Is Root Cause Analysis And When Is It Initiated?
This is a method used to understand the root cause of an experienced or observed occurrence. An RCA investigates the incident’s causative factors, concentrating on their what, why, and when. A company initiates RCA whenever it wants to identify the root cause of an issue and prevent a recurrence. Also, investigators should conduct an RCA when the system malfunctions or changes. This helps to understand the triggers and the situation. Overall, a root cause analysis addresses the underlying cause of an incident.
18. How Would You Conduct Root Cause Analysis?
There is no single method for conducting root cause analysis. But I would consider the following steps:
First, I would define the problem. This involves identifying the problem and making it as concise as possible. Next, I would collect all the relevant data that would aid in understanding the extent of the incident. Next, I would identify and map events to know how they correlate and contributed to the incident. The next step would be to identify the root causes and confirm their validity. Lastly, I would implement a solution to address the underlying cause and prevent its reoccurrence in the future.
19. What Do You Understand By Incident Response?
This is a mechanism a business uses to address and manage a cyberattack. A data breach or attack may cause disruption and can have an impact on brand value, consumers, business time, and resources. The goal of incident response is to minimize this harm and recover as soon as possible. An investigation is important to learn from the attack and improve future preparation. A well-designed and reproducible incident response strategy is the best method to protect a business.
20. Is Incident Response Important In Running A Business?
Yes, it is very important. If a business fails to manage and address an incident, that incident has the potential to develop into a more serious issue. That situation might ultimately result in a harmful data breach, significant expenditure, or system failure. Thus, incident response helps a company to prepare for known and unexpected incidents. Incident response provides a dependable way to spot security incidents as soon as they happen. A company can create a set of best practices through incident response to prevent or mitigate an attack before it causes damage. Running a business requires incident response since most businesses rely on sensitive data that might be harmfully compromised.
21. Incident Response Plan: What Is It?
This is a documented set of instructions that describes how a company will react to security events, hacker assaults, and data breaches. Various instructions are included in incident response planning for specific attack situations, preventing further harm, speeding up recovery, and lowering cybersecurity risk. Planning for security vulnerabilities and how businesses will recover from them is a key component of incident response procedures. Without a proper plan, companies could not identify attacks or might not know how to stop them once they are identified. Incident response is all about creating and having a plan before it’s necessary. It is a function that contributes to the ability of a company to make prompt choices based on accurate information.
22. What Metrics Would You Measure Metrics Incident Response Teams Against?
Like every other aspect of a business, incident response is managed based on what is measured. Ongoing management involves creating and assessing incident response goals to ensure all stakeholders are familiar with their roles and responsibilities. Thus, some common metrics to measure the incident response team are the number of incidents detected, average remediation time, number of incidents missed, number of incidents that need action, and competitor security ratings.
23. Are You Familiar With Phases of The Incident Response Lifecycle?
Yes, the incidence response lifecycle offers a valuable approach and framework to incident response in form of phases. It offers businesses a step-by-step framework that helps them to identify and react to various incidents such as security threats or service outages. The lifecycle breaks incidence response into six phases. These are:
- Preparation of procedure and systems
- Identification/detection and analysis
- Containment of incident activity
- Eradication of attackers
- Recovery from an incident
- Lesson learned and feedback application
24. What Happens During The Preparation Phase Of Incident Response Lifecycle?
The preparation phase involves assessing the efficiency of current security procedures and policies. Businesses achieve this by conducting a risk assessment to identify present vulnerabilities and your asset priority. Organizations prioritize responses for the different events using their assessment information. If at all possible, it is also utilized to restructure systems to address vulnerabilities and concentrate security on assets with a high priority. In this phase, one either improves their current rules and processes or, if necessary, creates new ones.
25. The Last Phase Of The Incident Response Lifecycle Is Often Overlooked. What Does It Involve?
The lesson learned stage is one of the most crucial and sometimes ignored phases. Here, the team involved in incident response work with other partners to discuss ways to enhance future efforts. This may entail assessing current guidelines and practices as well as particular decisions the team made in the course of the incident. The response team should summarize the results in a report, which can help in future training efforts. Forcepoint may assist your team in reviewing earlier instances and enhancing your response procedures. It takes a committed effort to continuously learn and strengthen your system against malicious actors to protect your business.
26. Why Is It Important To Incorporate Digital Forensics In Incident Response?
Digital forensics is a specialized area that focuses on locating, fixing, and looking into cyber security incidents. Digital forensics involves gathering, safeguarding, and examining forensic evidence. It provides a complete, accurate picture of what happened. When incorporated in incident response, digital forensics helps to restore company operations while locating and fixing security flaws. It also provides proof a business needs to file criminal charges against the intruders who targeted its operations. Evidence from digital forensic can support a cyber-insurance claim.
27. Why is Digital Forensics And Incident Response (DFIR) Important to Businesses That May Be A Target Of Cyber Security Attack?
Recovery is the primary concern for businesses prone to cyber security attacks. But it’s also crucial to know how and why an incident before putting things back to normal. DFIR uses a very thorough and complex forensic approach to provide that deeper understanding. To find out who attacked, how they intruded, the precise actions attackers took to breach systems, and what they might do to address those security vulnerabilities, DFIR professionals gather and examine a variety of information. Additionally, teams can use the information and evidence they obtain to support the defense in court against the identified cyber attackers.
28. Security Information And Event Management (SIEM): What Is It About?
SIEM is a method of security management, which combines security event management (SEM) and security information management (SIM) into a system to improve incident management. SIEM helps businesses to discover the route of a network attack as well as identify compromised sources.
29. What Are The Benefits Associate With SIEM?
SIEM offers several benefits. It reduces the time taken to identify serious threats, thereby reducing associated damages. It provides a holistic perspective of the information security environment of a company, making it easy to collect and analyze data to protect systems. SIEM provides security and threat detection threats. It can also help a business conduct a detailed forensic analysis following major security breaches.
30. What Security Incident Management Steps Does ISO/IEC Standard 27035 Outline?
The ISO/IEC Standard 27035 specifies a five-step methodology for managing security incidents, which includes:
- Prepare to handle incidents.
- Identify possible security incidents by monitoring and reporting all incidents
- Evaluate identified incidents
- Resolve and contain incidents based on step 3 outcome
- Document and learn from key incident takeaways
Conclusion
A great way to prepare for your next incident management interview is to understand the questions interviewers might ask. Knowing the best way to respond can help you to impress the interviewers easily. This article helps you to do exactly that. We hope these questions and answers will help you ace your interview.