Pre-Incident Planning: 5 Things to Document in an Incident Response Plan
Pre-Incident Planning:
Because when it happens, you won’t have time to look this up.
Most IT security preparation guides focus on what to do after an attack starts. Isolate the infected devices. Contact your IR firm. Notify legal. All sound advice, but only useful if you already know who to call, where your backups live, and which systems the business cannot survive without.
The problem is that the first hours of a ransomware incident are chaotic. Decisions that should take minutes take much longer when the information needed to make them is scattered across email threads, institutional memory, or systems that may now be inaccessible. That is not a technology failure. It is a documentation failure, and it is entirely preventable.
What follows is not an incident response plan. It is something smaller and more immediately practical: five critical categories of information your team needs documented and accessible before an incident begins. Building this list will not take long. Not having it when you need it will cost far more time than it saves.
When a security incident occurs, the first reaction is usually to pick up the phone. The problem is that many teams don’t always know who they should call.
Your escalation documentation should include contact information for your incident response team, lead contacts, and DFIR partner contacts. Also include the engagement process, contact information for your legal counsel (with data privacy experience), and your cyber insurance provider’s claims contact, along with your policy number.
The escalation documentation should contain key contacts and policy details necessary for an incident. Specifically, it needs:
Incident Response Team and Leads
Contact information for your internal incident response team and their lead contacts.
DFIR Partner
Contact details for your Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) partner, including their engagement process.
Legal Counsel
Contact information for your outside legal counsel, ensuring they have experience in data privacy.
Cyber Insurance
The claims contact for your cyber insurance provider and your policy number.
That last item is the one most often missing. Cyber insurance policies typically include specific notification windows, and missing them can create complications with your claim at exactly the moment you can least afford complications. Knowing your claims contact and policy number before an incident is a necessity.
One final note on cyber insurance: store your policy securely and separate from your primary systems. Threat actors who have spent time in your network before launching encryption may have access to documents stored there. Your policy information should not be where they can find it.
When everything is moving fast, you do not want to be searching for a phone number.
Threat actors target backups first. That is not speculation. It is a consistent pattern DriveSavers has observed across many ransomware incidents. Before encrypting production systems, attackers will often identify and compromise backup infrastructure to remove the victim’s most straightforward recovery path. By the time encryption runs, the backups may already be gone.
This shapes how you should think about backup documentation. It is not enough to know that backups exist. Your team needs to be able to quickly assess backup integrity under incident conditions, which means the architecture needs to be well-documented enough to support that assessment before anyone is under pressure.
Document where backups live, covering on-site, off-site, and cloud, how backup jobs run and on what schedule, and step-by-step restore procedures.
Assume your backups may be compromised until you can verify otherwise.
In a security incident, you will not be able to restore everything at once. Decisions about what comes back first will be made quickly, under pressure, by people who may be running on very little sleep. Those decisions go significantly better when made in advance, without the pressure.
Your critical data list should identify the systems the business cannot operate without, the datasets required for daily operations, and a clear priority order for restore: must-have versus nice-to-have.
Be honest about what the business actually depends on versus what is merely important. That honesty is much harder to find in the middle of an active incident. Prioritize the must-restore datasets before chasing the nice-to-have. Not everything can come back first, and knowing that in advance is a significant operational advantage.
In a security incident, recovery is not just about restoring data—it’s about restoring the right data first.
In a security incident, recovery is not just about restoring data—it’s about restoring the right data first.
In most environments of meaningful size, backup infrastructure spans multiple locations. Ownership documentation should cover who owns each backup environment, access credentials for backups, snapshots, and replicas, and where secondary systems and copies may exist.
Take into account that the same data frequently exists in multiple forms: a primary backup, a snapshot, a replica, an archived copy on tape or in a secondary cloud environment. In scenarios where primary backups have been compromised, knowing where else to look can make a significant difference.
A thorough ownership map is, in practical terms, a map of your recovery surface. The more complete it is before an incident, the more options you have during one.
The same data often exists in multiple forms. Knowing where to look expands the recovery options.
Successful operational recovery following a cyberattack relies heavily on the vendors that provide the products and services that sustain your infrastructure. Because of this, it is essential to have their escalation paths and support channels documented before an incident occurs.
The vendor contact list should include the vendors required to restore core operations, their support channels and escalation paths, and a data recovery partner for scenarios where backups and decryptors have failed.
That third item is the one most organizations leave off entirely. Backup failure and decryptor failure are not rare edge cases. They are realistic outcomes of a well-executed cyberattack. Having a professional data recovery partner identified and documented before an incident means you are not evaluating vendors at the worst time of the year for your organization. It also means your IR team has a parallel recovery path to pursue rather than waiting on a single point of resolution.
Documenting these relationships in advance ensures that when recovery begins, your team is executing a plan—not searching for one.
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