The things we find hardest in incident response

Incident response can still be challenging despite experience, tooling, and preparation. Some common difficulties include determining the most highly leveraged role to play, getting up to speed without disrupting the flow, making quick decisions as an individual versus seeking consensus, monitoring parallel actions and investigations, striking a balance between gut feelings and evidence gathering, recovering from bad assumptions, and reassessing initial findings when incidents escalate. These challenges provide opportunities for improvement in incident response processes and tools.