What Is Incident Response and Why It Starts Before a Cyber Incident

Incident Response Series Overview

We’ve created this article as part of our Incident Response Series, designed to help Australian small and medium businesses (SMBs) build confidence and ensure compliance with cybersecurity readiness.

Part 1: What Is Incident Response – and Why It Starts Before a Cyber Incident  (this article)  explains how proactive planning and frameworks like NIST CSF and SMB1001:2026 form the foundation of cyber resilience.

Part 2: Creating an Incident Response Policy explores how to define your business’s intent, authority, and responsibilities in partnership with your Managed Service Provider (MSP).

Part 3: Creating an Incident Response Plan shows how to turn that intent into coordinated action – defining roles, response procedures, and continuous improvement.

Together, these three articles help ensure your business is ready to respond, recover, and grow stronger after any cybersecurity event.

What Is Incident Response

When people hear the term incident response, they often imagine IT teams scrambling to fix a ransomware attack or data breach. While that’s part of it, true incident response begins long before an incident ever happens. It’s about readiness, not reaction.

At its core, incident response is a structured process for identifying, managing, and recovering from cybersecurity incidents – in a way that limits damage, reduces downtime, and helps prevent future issues.

Building on Proven Frameworks: NIST CSF and SMB1001:2026

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) is one of the most widely recognised guides for developing a mature cybersecurity program. It outlines five key pillars:

1. Identify – understand what assets and data you need to protect.
2. Protect – implement safeguards to limit or contain the impact of potential incidents.
3. Detect – recognise events quickly and accurately.
4. Respond – take action to contain and eliminate the threat.
5. Recover – restore normal operations and learn from the event.

We align our approach with these principles because they provide clarity, structure, and a shared language for improving resilience.

In Australia, these same ideas are reinforced by SMB1001:2026, a cybersecurity maturity standard designed specifically for small and medium businesses. At Level 3 (Gold) and above, it requires an Incident Response Plan to be in place. This ensures that an organisation can respond confidently, minimise damage, and demonstrate compliance with industry-recognised best practices.

For many of our clients, meeting this SMB1001 requirement isn’t just about ticking a box; it’s about building real-world preparedness and protecting customer trust.

The Building Blocks | Policy, Plan, and Practice

Incident response is more than one document, it’s a system built around three key elements:

1. Policy – your business’s statement of intent. It defines your commitment to respond effectively and the authority behind that response.
   
2. Plan – the step-by-step guide to follow during an incident: who does what, when, and how.
3. Practice – ongoing testing, reviews, and updates to ensure the process works under real-world pressure.

By having all three, your business transforms a reactive scramble into a coordinated and confident process.

Helping Businesses Get Ready

Most of our incident response work happens long before a crisis. Our team at IQPC, partner with local businesses to:

• Create strategic and practical documentation, including policies and plans that align with NIST CSF and SMB1001.
• Implement mitigative steps such as secure backups, monitoring, and staff training.
• Respond rapidly when an incident does occur – using decades of experience to minimise disruption and get systems operational fast.

Our goal is to make sure that when something does go wrong, you’re not starting from scratch. Incident response isn’t just about recovery – it’s about readiness. By following proven frameworks like NIST CSF and aligning with standards such as SMB1001:2026, your organisation builds resilience, earns customer confidence, and meets modern compliance

Expectations. Preparation is the difference between a setback and a success story.

If your business needs an incident response plan, reach out to our team to discuss how we can help.