You can have a good incident response plan and still find yourself dealing with something you never anticipated.
That doesn’t mean the planning failed.
There are simply too many variables in a modern IT environment to write a playbook for every possible situation. Suppliers change, systems become more connected, and the business starts depending on technology in ways that weren’t necessarily obvious when the original plans were written.
Eventually, something happens that doesn’t fit any of the scenarios you prepared for.
Realistically, the useful part of incident planning is what happens around the plan itself.
Does everybody know who needs to be involved?
Can you get hold of the right people quickly?
Do you understand which systems are likely to be affected if something unexpected happens elsewhere in the environment?
Those things give you somewhere to start while you work out what you’re dealing with.
It’s also useful to put plans under a little pressure occasionally.
A tabletop exercise can uncover assumptions that nobody had questioned before. You might discover that a contact has changed, somebody has responsibilities they didn’t realize they had, or a dependency has appeared since the plan was last reviewed.
But finding time to revisit incident planning isn’t easy.
When there’s no incident happening, there’s always something else with a more pressing deadline. Exercises get postponed, plans stay untouched for another few months, and everyone assumes they’ll find time to come back to them.
Then something unusual happens and you’re relying on preparation that may no longer reflect the environment you’re running.
This is an area where additional operational capacity can be really useful.
Co-managed support can give your internal team more room to revisit incident plans, test assumptions and spend time preparing for situations that aren’t already demanding their attention.
You may never predict the incident that eventually lands on your desk. But you can make sure you’re not starting from scratch when it does.
If creating more room for that kind of preparation would help your team, get in touch and we can talk about what co-managed support could look like.