Friday, December 7, 2018

Word of the Day: IT incident management

Word of the Day WhatIs.com
Daily updates on the latest technology terms | December 7, 2018
IT incident management

IT incident management is an area of IT service management (ITSM) in which the information technology team seeks to return a software application or network service to normal operations as quickly as possible after an unexpected event.

A pro-active IT incident management strategy helps keep an organization prepared for unexpected hardware, software and security failings and reduces the duration and severity of disruption from such events. Help desk and incident management teams rely on a mix of tools to resolve incidents, including monitoring tools to gather operations data for root cause analysis.

 

Most organizations use a support system, such as a ticketing system, for categorizing, prioritizing and documenting follow-up. Strategies for incident management may follow an established ITSM framework, such as IT infrastructure library (ITIL) or be based on a combination of guidelines and best practices established over time.

 

ITIL incident management uses this workflow for efficient resolution: incident identification, logging, categorization, prioritization, response, diagnosis, escalation, resolution and recovery, and then closure. An incident manager enforces the proper incident response and management processes across the IT support and service delivery team or teams. The incident manager is also likely to act as a communication bridge between end users and technical specialists during disruptions.

 

Support Levels

IT incident management is normally separated into three levels of support. Level-one support typically provides basic-level support or assistance, such as password resets or computer troubleshooting. Level-one support involves incident identification, logging, prioritization and categorization, deciding to escalate to level-two support and incident resolution when appropriate.

Level-two support goes through a similar workflow but is for more complex issues that need more skill or security access to complete. Major incidents are level-three support. This category includes incidents that might disrupt a business's operation and require an immediate response.

Quote of the Day

 
"Automated incident management systems should understand the interactions between the different aspects of a modern platform to comprehend where a problem really resides, not just where the problem's effects are felt." - Clive Longbottom

Learning Center

 

Create an IT support process to take on any outage
Take time to learn the steps of an IT support process, which tools to use and how to make fixes that improve stability. Don't wait until an outage on a critical application to pick up these skills.

5 tips to improve ITSM SLAs in IT shops with multiple service providers
Developing ITSM SLAs that work with multiple service providers is a complex puzzle to solve. As Pace Harmon's David Clifford explains, success depends upon keeping the perspective of the business uppermost in mind.

Use IT help desk tools to track, resolve and prevent IT incidents
IT help desk tools can benefit organizations of any size because they can reduce the time it takes to resolve issues, cut costs and prevent reoccurring problems through data collection and reporting.

Find the ideal incident management automation tool or tools
No more waiting and wondering how a support team's actions changed the platform or if they really fixed the problem. IT teams have several incident management automation tools to monitor and fix software.

Words to go: Incident management KPI categories
IT incident response is more art than science, but you can assign hard numbers to some metrics. Pick from this incident management KPI list to establish baselines, and judge where the support team needs to improve.

Quiz Yourself

 
Digital transformation is tied to the broader trend of business transformation and takes ______ to take hold.
a. awhile
b. a while

Answer

Stay in Touch

 
For feedback about any of our definitions or to suggest a new definition, please contact me at: mrouse@techtarget.com

Visit the Word of the Day Archives and catch up on what you've missed!

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1 comment:

Rowelli Jorden said...

Nice blog. Security incident management tools are becoming increasingly important as new regulations and legislation stipulate disclosure after security breaches. Thanks for sharing how to build best incident response framework for my enterprise.