Incident Response

Awareness and Advertising

In the process of establishing an incident response team, it is necessary to make the potential customers aware of the services the team has to offer. This is no different than advertising any new service to a community of users and clients, at least in principle. What makes advertising an incident response team different from advertising another business service is that incident response is an emergency service. Most people believe that to make use of an incident response service, a security incident must have taken place. In other words, something must have gone wrong for someone to make the call to the team in the first place. This is a topic that many people seek to avoid unless they are forced to deal with it. The bad news is that by the time they are forced to deal with it, it is often too late to effectively execute an incident response operation.

As such, the incident response team has to embark on a difficult marketing and advertising campaign in order to be effective. It isn’t enough to let the target community know that the team’s services are available, professional, and cost effective. Nor is it necessarily effective to issue an edict saying that everyone in the company must call the response team. The most effective team advertising and awareness campaign is one that is set up to entice the target audience into contacting the team and familiarizing themselves with the team’s service offerings. That is obviously more easily said than done. ...