While risk management is all about minimizing threats to a business or organization, incident management is all about how to deal with the incidents once they occur. An incident is anything that immediately disrupts services, like an outage or broken feature, and needs to be dealt with by an IT professional.
Data Environments CEO Robert E. Davis explains that “to competently perform rectifying security service, two critical incident response elements are necessary: information and organization.” Strong incident management will have processes in place that inform the right parties of the incident, and maintain organized procedures that lead to a quick resolution.
Companies of all sizes inevitably have to deal with different types of incidents. Technology isn’t perfect, and outages and breaks that must be dealt with immediately are bound to happen. If smooth incident management processes are put in place before an incident occurs, then it's much easier for IT teams to resolve the issue in an efficient way that doesn’t lose customers or revenue. Without incident management, a small issue can become detrimental for a company.