Critical Elements of Your Incident Response Plan

For today's small and midsize businesses (SMBs), an IT incident response (IR) plan isn't just a "nice to have"—it's a critical part of business continuity planning. Cyberattacks, data breaches, and IT outages are no longer rare events. When they strike, the consequences for SMBs are significant: Lost productivity, reputational damage, regulatory fines, and customer churn.

That's why building a thorough and tested incident response checklist for your business is essential. It ensures your organization can react quickly to disruption, minimize your losses, and recover faster and stronger—hallmarks of business resilience that prevent your business from becoming a statistic.

While crafting a business continuity strategy that contains a detailed incident response plan can seem overwhelming, the best approach starts by addressing the key elements of a solid IR plan one by one.

Key Takeaways

• A well-documented IT incident response plan helps SMBs reduce downtime, minimize damage, and meet cyber insurance or compliance requirements.
• The NIST incident response framework—Identify, Contain, Eradicate, Recover, and Learn—is a proven structure for building effective IT incident response strategies.
• MSPs can provide tailored support for SMBs, helping align cybersecurity tools and planning efforts with business continuity goals.

What Is Incident Response (IR)?

At its core, incident response is the structured and detailed process that helps your business detect, contain, and recover from cyber incidents. Industry best practices, including the NIST Incident Response Lifecycle, outline five steps:

1. Identification – Detect and confirm a disruption. Remember, not all outages are cyber attacks, so be sure to outline all possible scenarios for disruption. Define what a "disruption" is, and consider a system for classifying disruption in terms of its scope and impact to guide various response levels.
2. Containment – In the case of a cyber attack or other technology threat, have a plan for isolating affected systems to prevent spread and further disruption.
3. Eradication – Eliminate the threat from your environment.
4. Recovery – Restore systems and validate operations according to your RTO and RPO goals.
5. Lessons Learned – Review, document, and improve future responses by taking the time for a post-mortem on the incident, its causes, the team's response, and the outcomes.

Interested in a more detailed look at NIST incident response steps? Download the NIST publication.

By formalizing this cycle into an organization-specific, highly detailed plan that addresses specific needs of your business, you gain a repeatable roadmap to respond decisively—not reactively. Having that template in place enables your team to focus on response, avoiding the distraction of trying to build a plan while in the midst of a disruption.

Why Does Your SMB Need an Incident Response Plan?

Too often, small to mid-sized businesses feel protected from cyber attacks or other disruptions, but the truth is that those business interruptions don't play favorites. Any business can be hit with a breach, system outage, or cyber attack. Smaller doesn't make it any easier to navigate – in fact, with limited resources, it can be more damaging. Here's some more food for thought:

1. Downtime Is Costlier for SMBs
   We discussed that the cost of downtime for small businesses may be less than at an enterprise, but it still can range from $137–$427 per minute for SMBs to $5M per hour in high-risk industries. Plus, unlike large companies with large budgets, SMBs may face more prolonged outages because they have limited resources, and recovery can take much longer. There is a reason that studies show a huge number of small businesses hit by an outage never reopen their doors—the Small Business Administration estimates the number at close to 90%.
2. Cyber Insurance and Compliance Pressures
   Many insurers now require evidence of a documented IT incident response plan. Without it, small to mid-sized organizations risk higher premiums, denied claims, or regulatory noncompliance, adding to the financial uncertainty around unforeseen disruptions.
3. Trust and Reputation
   Your reputation is your most valuable currency. Customers and vendors want assurance that you can manage a crisis transparently and effectively. A well-designed incident response plan provides that confidence, and more importantly, allows you to get back to serving your community more quickly.

How Small Businesses Can Prepare For Cyber Incidents

As an MSP, we play a crucial role in helping our small business clients to prepare for disruption—and recovery. We use The Exigent Method to design long-term customer roadmaps that are practical, customized, and deeply aligned with your business goals. To achieve that, we must discuss your business continuity—from risk tolerance to recovery needs—and planning for the unexpected. While having the right-sized technology solutions in place to meet your industry requirements and operational needs, we can also help with setting the right business continuity policies and crafting your detailed IT incident response plan.

As a small business ourselves, Exigent has tackled this project internally, as well as with many clients, so we can provide cybersecurity incident response best practices, templates, tips, and more. Plus, because of our deep knowledge of your cybersecurity and business continuity IT tools, we can help ensure your technology is aligned with your planning goals.

Working with your MSP and the right stakeholders is essential to a well-defined incident response plan. Remember, you will need more than just technology to recover from a disruption. Finance, communications, vendors, and business partners will all play a role and should have a clear voice in developing your business' cyber incident response steps.

Remember, the goal of your IT incident response plan is simple:

• Minimize Damage: Limit the extent of harm to systems and data. 
• Reduce Costs: Control expenses associated with the incident. 
• Improve Recovery Time: Speed up the restoration of normal operations. 
• Protect Brand Reputation: Prevent or reduce damage to the organization's public image. 
• Enhance Future Prevention: Learn from the incident to strengthen security and prevent future occurrences. 

Download our free Cybersecurity Incident Response Checklist or schedule a consult with Exigent's experts to safeguard your business.

You may be interested in reading related-blogs:

• There's Nothing Scarier than a Data Breach  
• Response to Recovery: Crucial Steps to Business Continuity
• Six Steps to Cyber Resiliency