What is an Incident Response Manager?

Incident response managers give businesses a valuable wall of defense against cyber attacks. Through these managers’ continued research, businesses are all the better equipped to ward off current and future cyber attacks alike. Prospective incident response managers typically need to either have a bachelors degree or at least six years of professional experience. It is common for an incident response manager to have at least a marginal amount of experience with Security Operations Center (SEC) work.

As cyber criminals constantly develop new methods to circumvent enterprise security, incident response managers continually research the latest cyber security solutions in order to stay ahead of the curve. In the research that they conduct, incident response managers serve both as shields and thought leaders. The growing experience of an incident response manager is correlated with the growing resilience of their organization against all threats that would compromise its digital integrity.

Proactive Analysis

One of the key aspects of an incident response managers’ contributions to the company will be thorough malware analysis. By staying constantly aware of different forms of malware and how they operate, an incident response manager can be much more capable of spotting subtle signs of compromised security.

By being able to more proactively identify when security has been compromised, incident response managers can deduct the exact scale of an attack before it becomes unmanageable. Knowing how to judge the precise impact of any imminent cyber attack puts the company in the proper position to handle them with the proper level of urgency.

Security Team Guidance

Incident response managers will seldom work alone. Accurately deducting the probable causes of and best countermeasures against new cyber attacks is most feasible with a collaborative effort from multiple team members, and the incident response manager will serve as an important source of guidance for the team. Junior analysts still in the early stages of their careers can learn from an incident response manager to further develop their skills as cyber security professionals.

Security Protocol Optimization

In addition to coming up with more innovative ways to defend against cyber attacks, incident response managers ensure that the execution of said countermeasures are streamlined. The manager will evaluate the level of efficiency that a business currently carries out its cyber security workflow and address the most areas in most urgent need of improvement.

Leveraging Security Solutions

There will be more than one solution that an incident response manager can leverage in order to do their jobs. All of the incident responsiveness that the manager facilitates will be supplemented by the technical flexibility they have to leverage a full range of forensic techniques, software solutions and tools. Some of the specific tasks and solutions that an incident response manager will have proficiency in include:

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Analyses, Goal Setting And Performance Corrections

To ensure that the business’s cyber security initiatives stay on the right track, an incident response manager will conduct periodic performance analyses of the its security team’s performance. Though no cyber security team’s performance can be perfect, an incident response manager will play a vital role in making sure that the team’s goals are set in a well-advised. Based on the results of their examinations, the incident response manager can see to it that strong points are capitalized upon and weak points are mitigated.