Can an IRP be useful?
It's 2 AM on a Friday when one of your engineers texts you: something unusual is happening on the network. By the time you're on a call with three people who all have different opinions about what to do next, thirty minutes have passed and nobody has actually done anything. That's exactly what an incident response plan is designed to prevent.
A useful plan changes everything
When a security incident hits, the pressure is immediate. Systems may be down, data may be at risk, and stakeholders are asking questions you don't have answers to…yet. In that setting, improvisation is expensive. People guess at priorities, duplicate effort, or worse, take actions that make containment more difficult. Small incidents become big ones not because teams are incompetent, but because they're making decisions under stress without a shared playbook.
A documented incident response plan can go a long way. It can inform your team who does what, in what order, and how decisions should be made before anyone is under pressure.
There's also a compliance dimension. Frameworks like HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2, and NIST all require organizations to have a documented incident response process. If your company is subject to any of these, not having a plan isn't just a gap in your security program, it's a gap in your audit evidence. And auditors will ask for it.
Cyber insurance is another driver that's grown more significant in recent years. Carriers increasingly ask about incident response maturity when underwriting policies and at renewal. A documented, tested plan can affect what coverage you're eligible for along with the premium you’ll pay. A plan that lives only in someone's head doesn't satisfy an underwriter.
Finally, there's the reputational cost. The organizations that come out of incidents with their customer relationships intact are almost always the ones that responded quickly and communicated clearly. A slow, disorganized response — even to a relatively contained incident — signals to customers and partners that you're not in control.
The plan doesn't prevent incidents from happening. It determines how fast and cleanly you get out of one.
Putting it together in practice
An incident response plan isn't something you read once and file away. It lives in three states: resting, activated, and post-incident. In the resting state, the plan is documented, distributed, and kept current. Your team knows it exists, understands their role in it, and it gets reviewed on a regular cycle. Nothing is happening, but you're ready.
When an incident is declared, the plan is activated. The right people are notified, roles are assumed, and work begins according to a defined process. This is where the preparation pays off: nobody is waiting to be told what to do.
After the incident is resolved, you enter the post-incident phase. The team documents what happened, what worked, what didn't, and what needs to change. That review makes the next response better.
Part of what makes a plan operational is severity classification. Not every alert requires the same response. A well-structured plan defines which situations call for the full incident response team and which the security team can handle on its own. That distinction keeps your organization from treating every notification like a crisis, and from treating an actual crisis like a routine ticket.
Defined roles are another cornerstone. In a real incident, your Incident Commander coordinates the overall response and makes the calls on escalation and communication. Your Technical Lead investigates the scope of the incident and drives containment. Your Communications Lead manages what gets said to stakeholders, customers, and regulators, and when.
That last piece matters more than people realize. Regulatory notification windows are tight. HIPAA breach notification, for example, requires notifying affected individuals within 60 days of discovery. If your Communications Lead doesn't know what they're authorized to say, or your Incident Commander doesn't know the deadline, you can add a compliance violation on top of an already bad day.
A mature plan also connects to the rest of your business continuity posture. If a cyber incident threatens operations, it should trigger your Business Continuity Plan. The two plans should hand off cleanly so nothing falls through the gap between "security incident" and "business disruption."
Muscle memory
A documented plan is a starting point, not a finish line. The organizations that respond well to incidents have practiced their plan repeatedly, and across different scenarios. Tabletop exercises are the most accessible way to do this. You walk your team through a scenario: ransomware locking down a critical system, a credential breach exposing customer accounts, a vendor suffering an attack that reaches your environment, all without touching live systems. The goal isn't to pass a test. It's to find the gaps before an attacker does.
These exercises consistently reveal the same kinds of problems: unclear decision authority, contact lists with outdated numbers, ambiguity about who owns external communication. Better to find those in a conference room than at midnight in the middle of a crisis.
Regarding contact lists: test your communications tree. Don't assume the list is accurate because someone built it six months ago. Run a brief drill where you actually try to reach people using the documented contacts. You'll often find a number that's changed, a backup contact who doesn't know they're a backup, or a vendor liaison who left the company.
Annual review is not optional. Your organization changes: people move roles, vendors change, systems are added or retired. And the threat landscape is changing as well. Assign a specific owner to review the plan every 12 months and after any real incident, however minor.
After-action reviews are where the best learning happens. Even a low-severity incident like a phishing attempt that was caught and contained produces useful information if someone takes the time to write it down. What triggered the alert? How long did detection take? What would have happened if it had gone further? A brief lessons-learned document closes the loop and makes your next response faster.
Work on it now, before your next incident
A plan that nobody has read, practiced, or taken ownership of isn't an incident response plan — it's an ignored document in the back of a file drawer. The companies that handle incidents well aren't lucky. They prepared. That preparation includes looking at assigned roles, practiced scenarios, tested communications, and a plan that gets reviewed and updated rather than left to drift. It also means leadership treats incident response as an ongoing capability, not a checkbox.
If your organization doesn't have an incident response plan yet, or has one that hasn't been tested, Groman Cyber can help. We work with organizations to build plans that are practical and usable, run tabletop exercises that surface real gaps, and support teams through the review process after incidents occur. Contact us to get started by clicking here.