Standard : Security Incident Response Time

Description

Security Incident Response Time measures the duration between the detection of a security incident and the point at which effective containment or mitigation actions are initiated. It reflects your team’s readiness, tooling maturity, and ability to act swiftly under pressure.

Fast response times are critical to limit potential damage, protect sensitive data, and maintain operational trust.

How to Use

What to Measure

  • Time from detection timestamp (alert or report) to the first validated containment action (e.g. account disabled, system isolated, patch applied).
  • Optionally track time to full resolution separately.

Formula

Response Time = Containment Start Time – Detection Time

Instrumentation Tips

  • Use security incident management tools or ticketing systems (e.g. PagerDuty, Jira SecOps).
  • Include alerts and logs from SIEMs (e.g. Splunk, Datadog, Microsoft Sentinel).
  • Ensure timestamps are reliably captured for both detection and response initiation.

Why It Matters

  • Minimises impact: Every minute saved reduces potential breach scope or service degradation.
  • Enables trust: Demonstrates control and accountability to customers and auditors.
  • Regulatory readiness: Some frameworks (e.g. GDPR, ISO 27001) require fast response windows.
  • Culture of resilience: Reinforces preparedness and ownership in security operations.

Best Practices

  • Define clear response SLAs based on incident severity.
  • Maintain and test incident response runbooks regularly.
  • Train teams on security tooling and procedures.
  • Automate common containment actions (e.g. access revocation, container shutdown).
  • Review metrics during post-incident reviews and quarterly governance forums.

Common Pitfalls

  • Delayed escalation or unclear incident ownership.
  • Alert fatigue due to excessive or low-priority signals.
  • Manual, undocumented steps in containment workflows.
  • Inconsistent measurement of “response” across incident types.

Signals of Success

  • Security incidents are triaged and acted on within SLA.
  • Automated detection triggers automated mitigation actions.
  • Response metrics improve quarter over quarter.
  • All responders understand their role and tools.
  • [[Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)]]
  • [[Time to Remediate Vulnerabilities]]
  • [[Compliance Coverage]]
  • [[Secrets Exposure Rate]]
  • [[Automated Remediation Rate]]