Incident management has evolved considerably since the days of its beginnings. Incident management is all about identifying and tackling problems as they take place.
Incident management is a crucial part of the present-day business world. The future appears to be promising for IT incident management. However, the industry has realized how detrimental incident management can be for the current IT sector.
However, future incident management would require significant reforms, and it should evolve with the requirements of evolving customer requirements and business challenges.
Earlier, the professionals tasked with tackling technology incidents were mostly IT experts. Since then, there have been many significant alterations, and the contemporary proliferation of the cloud has empowered vendors to construct software and carry out deployment and operations.
However, what hasn’t changed is that incident management is still a core ITSM practice. However, incident management is undergoing massive changes.
READ MORE: The U.S SEC Has Proposed new rules Regarding Incident Management and Cyber Security
And, as with any other technology, the future of incident management cannot be predicted by past trends. Nevertheless, innovative technologies and trends are taking place in the sector, similar to many other industries. As a direct impact of the result, you can also expect more participation from the architecture, SecOps, and DevOps teams.
Decentralization- A Possible Incident Management Trend of the Future
Now that more people are getting involved in incident management, the burden on IT teams is comparatively lesser. The other benefit is faster response times, and the responsibility is distributed among more people familiar with the overall processes.
The other clear advantages include lesser downtime and enhanced levels of productivity. The clear benefits of such an approach are that it takes the pressure off the IT experts and speeds up response times by shifting responsibility to the people most familiar with the code. This minimizes downtime and maximizes team productivity. It also incentivizes good regulation.
Yet, the trend comes with its own set of challenges as well. The biggest challenge is that enterprises require some centralization, and sudden or faster changes towards decentralization may not be advisable in all scenarios. Nevertheless, many enterprises are considering decentralization in baby steps.
Such a decentralization approach also calls for increased collaboration among the participating teams. For instance, if DevOps is getting involved in the incident management process, the DevOps team requires active participation in IT infrastructure management.
READ MORE: Storage Security Is Not Always Taken Care of, Says Experts
Teams part of the processes need to be empowered to fix the problems faster and arrive at decisions. In addition, more participation at the individual level has to be ensured for the overall incident management.
Automation- Another Future Trend of Incident Management
The current incident management professionals have a plethora of highly powerful observability and monitoring tools. Therefore, it wouldn’t be a misconception to say that the often challenging incident management process is comparatively easier for the current IT Teams.
However, incident management professionals must realize that these tools must be effectively configured to thwart the possibilities of incident threats. This is where automation can bring in a difference by converting incident messages from existing systems into actionable alerts. In addition, these alerts should mobilize on-call personnel.
Such automation will also help alleviate the pressure on the on-call team, who otherwise will have to continuously check monitoring and observability metrics to unlock an incident.
The direct result is that they are allowed to devote more time to other functions, enhancing overall productivity levels. In other words, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that automation maximizes existing incident management investments of an enterprise. In addition, some of the available automation tools can enhance existing incident management responses.
In the coming years, incident management will assume significant importance, and it will be necessary for the IT teams to adopt the trends such as automation for effectively leveraging incident management to stay ahead of the competition.
Additionally, if you consider the ITIL guidelines, incident management is considered a separate industry or section from the incident response. The observation is based on the understanding or conception that both won’t happen in tandem.
Although this approach has been going on for quite some time, you have an incident management approach that is more or less ‘reactive’ in nature.
Here, what happens is that incident management focuses on reacting to or recovering from the incident attack. The whole team will be involved in recovering the system and mitigating the effects of disaster management. Here the impact of an attack is tackled after an incident has occurred. However, the root cause or the underlying possibility of an attack is not addressed yet.
Over the years, this trend of being in a reactive state has been changing slowly although. As a result, the incident management industry is changing from a reactive to a proactive state.
Here, what happens is that the incident management response involves incident prevention as well. Overall, there is a focus on improving the prevention management section, or an incident is tackled even before it occurs.
However, suppose an enterprise is actively considering blending these into incident management. In that case, the process requires a thorough rescheduling of its internal structure, and more participation from other teams, such as SecOps or DevOps, will be needed.
The Incident Management Industry: Market Size and Predicted Growth
At about 17.3 % CAGR, the worldwide incident response market is expected to grow to approximately USD 56340 by the end of 2027. (Market Analysis and Insights).
The key players in the industry include IBM, Accenture, Cisco, FireEye, and McAfee. In a technology-intensive industry, incident management is performing well. However, by integrating more tools, the industry is sure to improve beyond predictions.