Major incident management and disaster recovery are critical for maintaining your operations and avoiding negative impacts to customers in the face of resilience threats. However, there are key differences in these scenarios that will dictate whether major incident management or disaster recovery is needed.
This article explains the difference between major incident management and disaster recovery and what you need to know about creating and executing a major incident management plan vs a disaster recovery plan.
What is major incident management?
When a major incident occurs, whether it is a security breach, critical technology failure, or outage, major incident management is the process of immediately responding to that incident - encompassing diagnosing the problem and mobilizing teams to respond to it.
Major incident management is a broad, strategic approach that focuses on managing the impact of significant disruptions on the business, including communication, stakeholder management, and longer-term recovery. Due to the varied nature of business and technology threats, the steps that need to be taken are often worked out in the moment, rather than being a pre-planned set of tasks.
What is a disaster recovery plan?
Now we’ve covered major incident management, you might be wondering — what is a disaster recovery plan?
Disaster recovery is a much more predefined and planned set of tasks than major incident management and encompasses IT disaster recovery testing as well as the recovery itself. Unlike major incident management, which focuses on immediate incident response, disaster recovery involves a predefined and tested set of procedures aimed at regaining operational functionality following major system outages or large-scale incidents.
So, what elements should a disaster recovery plan cover? Like major incident management, a disaster recovery plan can be used for multiple scenarios, including ransomware threats, technology failures, and human error.
Want to learn more about how to build an effective disaster recovery strategy? Find out more about how to create a disaster recovery plan.
Key differences between major incident management and disaster recovery plans
As mentioned above, although there is some overlap between major incident response management and disaster recovery, there are some key differences between the two:
Goals and objectives
Essentially, both major incident management and disaster recovery have the same goal: To avoid negative impacts on the business following an incident. But they tackle different aspects of this challenge:
- Major incident management focuses on the immediate aftermath of the event where it might be unclear even what has happened. The goal is to restore systems and operations to normal as quickly as possible after the incident has been diagnosed and mitigated.
- Disaster recovery testing also enables the organization to prepare and practice their recovery to increase confidence and prove to regulators that they can recover within acceptable limits.
Timeline
The timeline is another critical difference when comparing major incident management vs disaster recovery:
- Major incident management happens immediately after the incident occurs, in fact, it begins before the team even necessarily knows what has happened.
- IT disaster recovery, on the other hand, is the process of returning to business as usual and can vary in timeline depending on the complexity of the disaster, from minutes to hours to days to even weeks or longer for very complex situations.
Challenges
Each approach presents its own set of operational and technical challenges.
- Major Incident Managers deal with the challenge of having to switch frequently between different tools during a fast-paced response. This lack of a centralized execution and visibility solution also impacts effective communications and the speed at which the response team can be mobilized, costing valuable time needed to ensure incident resolution.
- IT disaster recovery is a complex process that presents several challenges as well, including ensuring data integrity and minimizing downtime during unexpected outages. Organizations must maintain up-to-date backups, coordinate across multiple departments, and test recovery plans regularly to ensure effectiveness. Additionally, evolving cyber threats, complex IT infrastructures, and limited resources can hinder timely recovery efforts, making it crucial to have a well-documented and thoroughly tested disaster recovery strategy in place.
Principles of major incident management and disaster recovery
Understanding the principles of major incident management and disaster recovery is key to ensuring your business can respond swiftly and recover effectively when critical issues arise.
Major incident management steps
Major incident management steps include:
- Detect: Identify unusual activity or service disruptions through monitoring tools, alerts, or user reports. When an incident is detected, this kicks off the process and teams must mobilize and coordinate the response.
- Diagnose: Analyze data to determine the root cause, assess impact, and prioritize the incident based on severity.
- Mitigate: Implement temporary measures to limit damage or restore partial functionality while working on a full resolution.
- Resolve: Apply a permanent fix, restore full services, and verify normal operations before formally closing the incident. The steps to perform this part of the process often have to be worked out on the go, without a planned route, but there are some repeatable steps that you can have ready as “canned” response patterns to add into your ad-hoc plan.
The IT disaster recovery process
The IT disaster recovery process involves:
- Plan: Develop and document a disaster recovery strategy, including roles, responsibilities, backup procedures, and recovery objectives.
- Test: Regularly simulate disaster scenarios to validate the recovery plan’s effectiveness and identify any gaps or weaknesses.
- Recover: Execute the recovery procedures to restore systems, data, and services as quickly and safely as possible. Unlike the incident response process, the recovery actions will be based on a pre-approved set of steps outlined in a template.
- Report: Document the incident and recovery process for regulatory reporting and continuous improvement.
When to use major incident management or disaster recovery — or both
So, in which scenarios should you employ the principles of disaster recovery vs major incident management?
When to use major incident management
Use major incident management for managing real-time threats like data breaches, malware infections, unauthorized access, hardware or software failure, network outages, or human config errors.
In these situations, the goal of major incident management is to respond rapidly, contain the impact, and restore normal service as quickly as possible.
When to use a disaster recovery plan
Use your IT disaster recovery plan when systems or infrastructure have been disrupted and need to be restored to an alternative location, or when you need to test your ability to recover from this kind of scenario.
When major incident management and disaster recovery work together
Major incident management and IT disaster recovery procedures serve complementary roles in enhancing an organization’s resilience to operational disruptions.
- Major incident management is characterized by its dynamic, real-time response to unexpected events. It relies on rapidly assessing unfolding situations, mobilizing the right personnel, and implementing immediate containment and resolution strategies. This spontaneity is crucial for mitigating damage during the early stages of an incident, especially when information is incomplete or rapidly changing.
- Disaster recovery is a more planned, methodical restoration of critical systems following a significant disruption. It involves pre-defined templates, documented procedures, standardized automations, and regular testing to ensure systems and data can be recovered efficiently. By integrating the responsive nature of major incident management with the structured approach of disaster recovery, organizations can create a more holistic resilience framework. The incident response team can initiate triage and work on a temporary fix, while disaster recovery teams follow tested protocols to restore full service.
When combined, these disciplines ensure not only rapid response but also systematic restoration, minimizing downtime and preserving business continuity.
How automation and AI support major incident management and recovery: Cutover automated runbooks
Cutover’s AI-powered runbook automation software has dedicated action workspaces for both rapid major incident management and comprehensive IT disaster recovery.
Cutover Respond: Major incident management
Cutover Respond for major incident management reduces response times with action-driven collaboration, coordination, and visibility. It enables you to:
- Adopt a task-led approach with AI-powered automated runbooks
- Easily access stored incident response patterns by inserting snippets into your response runbook
- Integrate with your ITSM platform such as ServiceNow to maintain a source of truth and system of record, and access the data from the ITSM in a central execution platform, removing the need to constantly switch between tools during a response
- Collaborate effectively and get real-time visibility and transparency
- See an accurate view of live activity and what has already been completed
Cutover Recover: Disaster recovery
Cutover Recover for IT disaster recovery also offers AI functionality to create, improve and summarize runbooks and integrate AI agents. It can incorporate application data into your recovery runbooks, and provides automation, integrations, and visibility for disaster recovery planning, testing, execution, and audit trails for regulatory reporting.
Whether addressing major incident management vs disaster recovery or integrating both, Cutover helps you build a scalable, responsive, and compliant operational resilience strategy. Find out more about Cutover Respond and Cutover Recover.