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Resource 2025-07 5 min

Incident response communications: calm, consistent, documented

A lightweight communications model for incidents: who speaks, what gets logged, and how decisions are captured.

Incident response Communications Governance

The risk in most incidents

The technical work is often fine—the failure is communication: unclear ownership, inconsistent updates, and missing decision logs.

A simple structure

  • Incident commander: owns decisions and prioritization
  • Technical lead: owns triage, containment, and recovery tasks
  • Comms lead: owns updates to leadership and stakeholders

A standard update format

  • What happened (known facts only)
  • What we did (containment actions)
  • What’s next (planned actions + ETA)
  • Risks/unknowns (explicitly stated)
  • Decision log (who approved what)

Outcome

Less confusion, less rework, better recovery.

Quick actions
  • Document ownership boundaries.
  • Stage changes and verify outcomes.
  • Measure and report monthly.
Want help implementing?

We can translate these controls into a staged plan with verification steps for your environment.