Incident Response Plan Template

A workplace emergency is an umbrella term covering a broad array of situations where the staff, customers, general public and/or normal business operations are at risk due to unforeseen man-made or natural disasters. If you’re looking to develop an emergency preparedness plan, a good place to start out is the OSHA website.

Once you are familiar with these standards and have conducted a hazard assessment, you can start working on the step-by-step implementation protocols. This can entail staff training sessions, role assignments in the event of an emergency, etc. You should try to list all the crucial activities on a timeline, which will make it easier for upper management to visualize and approve.

The objective of an emergency plan is to minimize or negate the impact of a workplace incident. Or, more specifically, to:

• Prevent injuries and fatalities;

• Reduce damages to the infrastructure and equipment;

• Safeguard the environment and structures in the vicinity;

• Speed up the recovery and resume normal operations ASAP.

To do so, it’s important to conduct a vulnerability assessment and determine the likelihood of certain types of incidents. Also, take into consideration the availability of means to stop them from escalating and the steps to take in each scenario.

Creating and implementing Incident Action Plans are tasks that fall to the Operations Section Chief. This role is uniquely positioned to organize training sessions for the staff, assign roles in various scenarios, allocate resources, supervise the internal response teams, and liaise with external services.

The Incident Command System (ICS) represents a standardized set of protocols for the control and coordination of emergency responders. The ICS also details the temporary management hierarchy during a crisis, making it flexible enough to meet challenges such as:

• Jurisdictional restrictions and conflicting levels of authority;

• Melding interdepartmental personnel into a quick response unit;

• Eliminating duplication of effort to increase the effectiveness of the response;

• Providing logistic and administrative assistance to the responders.

The Incident Command System (ICS) utilizes a range of standard forms that provide guidance for achieving objectives and ensuring the optimal flow of communication during an incident. With respect to the ICS 201 form, this document contains:

• Basic description of the incident;

• Resources allocated towards resolving the situation;

• Steps taken to negate the impact of the crisis.

In short, it is a briefing document for the Incident Commander and the Operations Sections chief, along with the general staff involved in handling the incident.

Within the Incident Command System (ICS) framework, you can always find five critical management functions:

• Incident command: decides the incident management goals and sets their priorities, has ownership over the handling of the event;

• Operations management: oversees tactical operations based on the plan, assigns tasks and manages resources;

• Planning: collects and evaluates information about the incident and resource status, and documents the Incident Action Plan;

• Logistics: handles support and services required to meet the incident goals;

• Finance and administration: monitors costs, provides accounting and deals with procurement.

Out of the aforementioned functions, the Incident Commander position is the only one that’s always staffed in ICS applications.

Emergency response plans are documents that detail a series of steps to take in a crisis situation, which can be anything from an active shooter threat to hazardous chemical spills or a fire. These plans are tailored to individual scenarios and have the role of eliminating the guesswork on who is assigned a role in the management of the crisis. Since time is of the essence, having an emergency response plan can definitely minimize or completely prevent injuries and property damage.

Simple emergency action plans are good enough for offices or small brick and mortar storefronts, where evacuation is rarely a problem and you aren’t dealing with hazardous materials or processes: the alarm rings, and the employees and visitors exit the premises in an orderly fashion. On the other hand, organizations with large office buildings or that deal with potentially toxic/flammable chemicals will require detailed, scenario-specific emergency action plans.

Here are 5 steps to follow to make sure you develop a set of foolproof security protocols:

1. Perform a risk assessment to determine the most probable threats and review any pre-existing policies to deal with said threats;

2. Determine the resources available in an emergency and liaise with public emergency services (police, fire department, etc.) to learn their response time to your facility and their ability to deal with an emergency on your company’s premises;

3. Check if there are regulations specific to your type of operations, and ensure your plan adheres to them. Ensure there are life safety protocols in place (shelter, secure rooms, lockdown, evacuation pathways);

4. Create hazard specific procedures for threats identified during the risk assessment and create coordinated emergency plans with public services;

5. Ensure your company’s personnel receives the proper training for responding to the emergency. Conduct regular drills and exercises to practice handing various types of incidents.

Cyber crimes are on the rise, according to a report from Cisco, that anticipates a 75% increase in the number of cyber attacks in the 2021 to 2025 interval. Another report by the UK government states that 39% of the organizations in the country suffered a data breach in 2022. Therefore, creating a cyber security incident response plan – a document that outlines the protocols your organization needs to follow in the wake of such an event – is a must.

Typical cyber security incident plans follow these 6 phases:

1. Preparation: creating the plan and training the employees in role specific information security;

2. Identification: discovering the intrusion, labeling it as a security incident, and evaluating the scope of the breach, the source, and the impact on operations;

3. Containment: mitigating the damage and blocking the access of the intruder (this may imply taking the systems offline);

4. Eradication: removing the vulnerabilities that have made the intrusion possible in the first place;

5. Recovery: testing the data infrastructure and getting systems back online;

6. Learn from the incident: reviewing the incident, evaluating the steps taken to mitigate it and finding out how the security protocols can be improved for future scenarios.

The concepts threat, vulnerability, and risk, which are part of the cyber security jargon, tend to get mixed up sometimes, leading to confusion. Understanding the differences between them will help you communicate easier with the IT department (or external contractors handling your company’s information infrastructure) and give you a better grasp of cyber security technologies.

Here are the major differences between risks, threats, and vulnerabilities:

• Risk: the potential for data loss, system damage or even complete destruction that could result in the event of a cyber-attack; the risk profile of an organization varies in accordance with internal or external factors, and while it can never be fully eliminated, you can take actions to reduce it to an acceptable level;

• Threat: any factor that increases the chances of a cyber security crisis, from malware and ransomware to hackers and DDOS attacks;

• Vulnerability: any weakness in your data infrastructure that could allow a threat to penetrate security and expose your systems and assets to an attack.

You can frame this explanation as a formula: risk = vulnerability + threat.