What is Incident Management?
Incident Management is the process for rapidly detecting, recording, analysing and resolving disruptions (incidents) in IT or OT systems — with the aim of restoring service as quickly as possible.
An incident is any unplanned interruption to or degradation of a service, system or process.
Incident Management is a core process within ITIL, ISO 27001, IEC 62443, and is essential for reliable business operations.
🎯 Purpose of Incident Management
- Minimal impact on production or service delivery
- Rapid recovery time (MTTR)
- Standardised approach for every incident
- Records for analysis, compliance and improvement
- Coordination between IT, OT, security and operations
📄 Examples of incidents
| Type | Example |
|---|---|
| IT incident | Network goes down, server crashes, login fails |
| OT incident | SCADA is unresponsive, PLC loses connectivity, HMI hangs |
| Security incident | Malware infection, DDoS attack, data breach |
| User incident | Printer offline, application freezes |
🔁 Steps in Incident Management
- Detection – The incident is noticed (by user, monitoring, SIEM)
- Logging – In a ticketing system or log book
- Classification – Determining impact, urgency and priority
- Diagnosis – Analysis of the cause and possible solution
- Escalation (if required) – To 2nd/3rd line or OT/security teams
- Resolution or workaround – System recovery or temporary fix
- Closure – Feedback, documentation and evaluation
🧠 Key concepts
| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| MTTR | Mean Time to Repair – average recovery time |
| SLA | Service Level Agreement – agreed availability terms |
| KPI | Performance metric (e.g. # incidents per month) |
| Major Incident | A critical incident with significant impact (e.g. production stop) |
| Known Error | A known issue with an established workaround |
🏭 Incident Management in OT environments
- Impact may directly affect production, safety or quality
- Involvement of production, maintenance and IT/Security required
- Logging incidents helps with LOPA, HAZOP and Change Management
- Often combined with physical faults or network issues
- An essential part of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
📊 Incident Management vs. Problem Management
| Incident | Problem |
|---|---|
| Acute, resolve now | Analyse the underlying cause |
| Rapid recovery is the priority | Resolving the root cause is the priority |
| Reactive to a disruption | Works preventively or based on trends |
The two processes reinforce each other!
✅ Benefits of Incident Management
- Faster recovery from failures
- Streamlined communication
- Better customer and user experience
- Support for compliance and audits
- Input for structural improvement
📌 In summary
Incident Management provides a structured approach to disruptions, so that systems and services are restored quickly — with minimal impact on your IT, OT or production environment.