Managing the Inevitable – A Maturity Model to Establish Incident Response Management Capabilities

Abstract

Although the ongoing digital transformation offers new opportunities for organizations, more emphasis on information security is needed due to the evolving cyber-threat landscape. Despite all preventive measures, security incidents cannot entirely be mitigated. Organizations must establish incident response management to treat inevitable incidents in a structured manner and under considerable time pressure. If not handled, incidents can result in reputational or financial losses and disrupt business continuity. Especially organizations that have not addressed incident response management extensively need to understand which capabilities are required to develop their incident response management. However, research still lacks a practice-grounded and socio-technical conceptualization of those capabilities and their development. For such challenges, maturity models have proven valuable in practice and research. This paper follows a design science research approach to develop an incident response management maturity model (IRM3) closely aligned with practice requirements under a socio-technical lens. Iteratively applying and evaluating the IRM3 with seven real-world organizations leverages its comprehensive view based on four focus areas and 29 capability dimensions to understand which capabilities organizations need to approach incident response management. Building on existing research, this work provides a comprehensive perspective on incident response management and its associated capabilities. For practitioners, especially in organizations with initial incident response maturity, the IRM3 offers descriptive value when used as a status quo assessment tool and prescriptive value by outlining capabilities for successful incident response management.