Major Incident Management Process

The major incident management process is a set of steps taken to identify, analyze, and resolve critical incidents that can cause problems if not addressed. The DevOps Major Incident Management for DevOps and IT operations teams outlines how they will respond to unplanned events or service interruptions and restore services to operational offsets. The Azure Incident Management Program is an important responsibility for Microsoft and represents a trusted investment for all customers who use Microsoft's online services. 

Mostly all companies subscribe to one of the SAAS products based on their features, advantages, and criticality of incidents. The SaaS provider provides major incident management solutions within the Cloud. Still, privacy and safety issues are there depending on challenges due to partial or whole abstraction of the IaaS from the cloud provider. 

The major incident management process is essential for your organization, as it helps minimize the impact of major incidents on your business. Major incident management restores normal service operations while minimizing business impact and maintaining quality. 

Major incident resolution and closure is the key challenge for all organizations looking to IT teams. IT teams need to resolve incidents as quickly as possible using appropriate prioritization methods. Once the incident is resolved, it will be further logged to understand how to prevent the incident from recurring and how to reduce the time to resolution. 

Incidents in the Cloud can disrupt operations, cause temporary downtime, and lead to data and productivity losses. By definition, an incident is an event that can disrupt or cause an outage to operate, service, or function. Incident management describes the actions your organization needs to take to analyze, identify, and resolve issues while taking actions that can prevent future incidents. 

The major incident management process demands strict following of these steps: 

1. Selecting a SaaS-Based Incident Management Tool 
2. Following Major Incident management process Guidelines 
3. Implement major Incident management life cycle

1.  Selecting a SaaS-Based Incident Management Tool 

Select a basic SaaS-based incident management solution based on the following:

• Easiness to use
• Means of communication by the incidence management service they offer – i.e., email, text message, a smartphone application for alerts and monitoring
• Quality of web server of the service provider
• Tele-assistance and consultation
• Free of cost trial
• Testimonies
• Easiness of integrity with other tools and presence of API
• Single Point contact for Failure Analysis
• Monitoring and Alerting as much as possible regarding components, processes, communications, workflows, and response time
• Finding Escalation Path and Hunt Group
• Document Changes
• Customer-Asset Mapping Management 

2.  Following Major Incident Management Process Guidelines 

Log Everything

Regardless of the severity, urgency, or caller location of the incident, your tool must always record everything in the minute detail as possible so that you can track all incidents in reduce time to respond and give resolution. 

Please Fill In All the Details 

Please fill in everything carefully to make sure it is detailed for further investigation, information gathering, or generated reports. Keep the classification clean. Avoid unnecessary categories and subcategories that can be sorted elsewhere or described in fields and avoid using options such as "Other" as much as possible. 

Keep Your Team up to Date

Standardize the process so that all team members follow the same steps and use the appropriate response to each incident. This guarantees consistent and consistent quality. 

Log and Use the Standard Solution

If effective solutions exist, use them to step forward and standardize. 

Support Staff

Proper and consistent training of employees at all levels including non-IT personnel and IT personnel is a great benefit to the organization. Well-trained teams collaborate more effectively and communicate better. 

Set Important Alerts

Carefully plan how the events are categorized and what those categories mean so that incidents are not overlooked or response times are too long. A good starting point is to define service level indicators used to determine the hierarchy of priorities. For example, prioritize root cause analysis over superficial symptoms. 

Prepare the Team for On-call Obligations L1, L2, and L3 

Develop a preparatory plan to ensure that first responders with the right expertise are available in the event of an incident with who is monitoring the incident and when. 

Set Communication Guidelines

The policy must specify the channels that employees use, the content of those channels, and how communication is documented. Well-documented communication helps teams to review the communication and refer to them to relay all the necessary details without losing information. 

Streamline the Change Process (Escalation Approval)

Identify the level or type of change that an individual can make and needs approval. Make sure that a board to monitor changes is always available so that the change procedure can be done quickly and effectively. 

Improve Your System With Lessons Learned

Review the incidents and evaluate the reason for the incident. Identify possible reasons and precautions you should take for future incidents with proper documents for responsibility, accountability, and compliance. 

3.  Implement a Large Incident Management Lifecycle

You can realize your dream of an incident-free workplace by monitoring and analyzing the incident management lifecycle using a powerful Enterprise Health monitoring Solution platform. With the right EHS platform, leaders can track every step in the incident management process, enabling teams and managers to respond quickly to accidents and difficult situations. 

New/New/Latest Case 

This condition refers to an instance whose incident is logged but not yet assigned. Just log there is an issue. That’s all. Here, the incident has been logged but has not yet been investigated. 

Canceled

The incident was displayed, but it turned out that there were no replicas, unwanted incidents, or events. 

In-Progress/ Happening/Current Processing

After an incident is assigned to a team or manager for review, it is considered "in progress". At this step, one begins to investigate the possible consequences of the problem. Incidents have been assigned and are under investigation. 

On-Hold/Paused/Pending/Waiting List

This stage is a bit rare. Select the pause option to display a list of reasons on the screen. Here, the person who initially assigned the task needs additional information on how to deal with the problem or evidence of how the incident has affected the organization in the past. Incident liability is temporarily transferred to another entity, providing more information, evidence, or additional comment solutions. When the caller updates the incident, the queue reason field is cleared and the status of the incident changes to in progress. Then an email notification is sent to the user whose name is displayed in the Assigned To field and the user in the watchlist. 

Resolving

During this step, the incident will not be completely resolved but will be mitigated for some time to prevent further incidents from occurring due to the same issue like quarantine or working on other browsers. If left unattended a similar incident poses an imminent threat to the workspace. A satisfactory fix is provided for the incident to make sure that it doesn't occur again and the incident can be pushed to pending or closed. 

Repaired/Solved/Closed

An incident is considered "closed" when a team member working on a particular incident resolves the issue, thereby preventing further injuries or accidents in the long run. 

Resolved

The incident will be in the resolved status for the specified period and will be marked as closed after confirming that the incident has been successfully resolved.