When incident response requires business response, who should you notify?

Incident response involves both technical and non-technical strategies to address and mitigate the impact of unforeseen system issues, particularly on customer-facing applications, which can affect a wide range of stakeholders from engineers to executives and customers. Effective communication is crucial in managing such incidents, requiring tailored updates to different audiences such as executives, customer service teams, and customers, each needing varying levels of detail. Companies can prepare by developing communication templates to ensure timely and appropriate information dissemination during incidents, which can help maintain customer trust and streamline internal coordination. The roles of communications lead and business incident response lead are essential to manage technical and non-technical communications respectively, and tools like PagerDuty offer solutions to enhance response efficiency and minimize customer impact. Organizations are encouraged to vet and test communication strategies and templates with stakeholders, including legal and executive teams, to ensure effectiveness and approval, thereby fostering transparency and trust.