Guide · Cybersecurity
Incident Response Plan for Startups
Startups need incident response too. Runbooks, escalation, communication. A simple plan that works.
No plan means slow containment—APRF Incident Readiness needs roles, runbooks, and comms before SEV-1. Primary control: Incident Readiness
Chaos is the default without a one-pager
When prod breaks, startups without a plan burn the first hour on "who do we call?" instead of fixing. One team lost an hour to escalation confusion after a database outage; a short runbook would have made first actions minutes.
Write the plan on a single page
Detect — what alerts fire (uptime, error rate, budget). Own — primary on-call and backup (names or rotation link). Act — runbooks for DB down, API 5xx, auth outage. Tell — status page or X/Slack customers see within N minutes. Learn — short post-incident note: cause, fix, prevention.
PagerDuty/Opsgenie is nice; a shared doc + Slack @channel works until you have two people. Rehearse once so the page isn't fiction.
Readiness is a reliability gate
APRF Incident Readiness expects a known path from alert to action. Pair with outage runbooks and uptime monitoring so the plan has something to attach to.
Next: Incident Readiness
Open the related pillar specification for mandatory checks, artifacts, and pass conditions. Self-attest is optional.
Related
Frequently asked questions
- What should an incident response plan include?
- Runbooks for common failures, escalation path (who gets paged), communication plan (status page, Twitter), and post-incident review process.
- Do startups need incident response?
- Yes. Even a simple plan—runbooks, escalation, communication—reduces chaos and downtime when something breaks.
- What is a runbook?
- A runbook documents how to fix common failures. E.g., 'Database down: check RDS status, restart if needed, check connection pool.' Reduces time to fix.