Building an effective Incident Response Plan (IRP) is crucial for both security readiness and compliance. Vanta’s platform provides tools to create, document, and continuously monitor your IRP, helping you meet standards like ISO/IEC 27035, NIST SP 800-61, and SOC 2. This guide walks you through a step-by-step approach to develop and operationalize your IRP using Vanta.
Document Your Incident Response Plan in Vanta
Start by formalizing your IRP as a written policy within Vanta. In Vanta’s Policy Builder, you can use a ready-made Incident Response Plan template that comes with a policy template aligned to relevant regulations. This ensures your plan covers required elements for frameworks (e.g. SOC 2, ISO 27001) and can serve as audit evidence. When documenting your plan, make sure it includes:
Scope and Framework: Define your incident response framework and overall approach to threats. Clearly state what constitutes an “incident” for your organization.
Response Phases & Procedures: Outline the specific steps for each phase of incident response, from detection and analysis to containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident review. For example, include severity ratings and specify how incidents will be identified, logged, contained, and resolved.
Roles and Responsibilities: List who is involved in the response process and their duties (details on defining roles in the next section). Each step in the process should have an owner.
Communication and Reporting: Describe how incidents will be reported internally and externally, including notification timelines (e.g., regulatory breach notifications) and communication channels (more on this below).
Metrics and Monitoring: Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) you will track (e.g,. time to detect and respond, number of incidents) to measure the plan’s effectiveness.
Remember that auditors will expect to see a documented Incident Response Plan (IRP) that outlines potential incident scenarios, pre-planned response steps, communication requirements, and post-incident analysis procedures. Vanta’s platform enables you to collaborate on this policy with your team and obtain approval, ensuring everyone has a clear understanding of what to do in the event of an incident.
Please note: Perform a risk assessment before finalizing your IRP. Understanding your security posture and top risks (utilize Vanta’s risk assessment tools) will help tailor the plan to the threats most likely to impact your business.
Define Incident Response Roles and Responsibilities
A successful IRP relies on a clear definition of who will do what during an incident. Using guidance from standards like ISO/IEC 27035 and NIST, establish a dedicated Incident Response Team (often called a CSIRT or IRT) with defined roles. Document these roles in your Vanta IRP policy so that everyone understands their responsibilities. Key roles to consider include:
Incident Lead/Coordinator: Person in charge of managing the incident from start to finish, ensuring procedures are followed.
Security Analyst/Responder: Team members who investigate, contain, and remediate the incident (e.g., detection & response engineers).System Owners/Administrators: Technical experts responsible for affected systems or infrastructure, who can help isolate and restore systems.
Communications Manager: Designated person to handle stakeholder communications (internal updates and external notifications)
Compliance or Legal Advisor: Individual to advise on compliance obligations (e.g. reporting requirements) and log incident details for audit purposes.
Depending on your organization’s size, one person may wear multiple hats; however, each role and task should be adequately covered. Also, ensure that you include supporting personnel, such as IT support, HR (if the incident involves an insider), or third-party contacts, as needed. ISO 27035 emphasizes preparing an incident response team (IRT) with clear roles and authority, and NIST SP 800-61 stresses that all parties should be aware of their roles and communication lines.
In Vanta, once these roles are documented in the policy, you should communicate this plan to the team. Ensure that each responsible person has access to the relevant information in Vanta or has at least reviewed the IRP. During an actual incident, your team will refer to these defined roles to act quickly and avoid confusion.
Best Practice: Conduct an orientation or training session for your incident response team on the documented plan. (This is referred to as a tabletop exercise). Walk through each person’s duties and the workflow before an incident occurs, so that everyone is prepared to fulfill their role when it counts.
Lessons Learned: Perform and document an analysis of the incident handling, identifying areas of improvement as needed. Determine the cadence of reviews or severity of incidents that will be reviewed.
Establish Communication and Notification Procedures
Effective communication is the backbone of incident response. Your Vanta-documented IRP should define how information will flow during and after an incident:
Internal Communication: Determine how the incident team will coordinate in real-time (e.g., create a dedicated Slack or Teams channel or establish a bridge line for each incident). Include this in your plan so it’s clear where team members should convene virtually. For example, many organizations use an incident management tool to automatically open a Slack channel for the response. If you don’t use a separate tool, specify the process (e.g., “Notify the on-call engineer by phone and start a Slack channel named #inc-<incident_name>”). The goal is to ensure quick, centralized communication with complete visibility for the response team.
External Notification: Outline who needs to be notified outside the organization, and how. This could include customers, affected partners, regulators, or law enforcement, depending on the severity and type of incident. Define criteria and timelines for external notifications in your plan. For instance, if the incident involves a data breach of personal data, you may need to notify users and authorities within a specified timeframe. Clearly state when and how to escalate communications: e.g., “If customer data is compromised, the Communications Manager will likely involve the organization's legal team, and will send breach notice emails to affected customers and report to regulators within required timelines.”
Notification Templates & Channels: It’s wise to have pre-drafted templates for incident communications, such as security advisories, breach notifications, and press statements. In Vanta’s policy document, you can reference these or attach them as needed. Also, note the channels to use for different audiences, such as email, status page updates, and phone calls for critical vendors, among others.
Ensure that responsibilities for communication are assigned. Your plan might specify that the Communications Manager (or a designated executive) is responsible for all public statements and customer updates. At the same time, the Incident Lead handles internal status updates to management. This separation enables the technical team to focus on resolving the issue while communications are handled professionally.
Finally, record all communications as part of the incident log. Vanta doesn’t send notifications on your behalf, but it can serve as a central repository for evidence. After an incident, you can upload post-mortem reports or communication records to Vanta to demonstrate you followed your procedures (useful for audits or ISO 27001 compliance). Clear communication procedures in your IRP not only improve response efficiency but also help meet compliance obligations for the timely disclosure of breaches.
Implement the Plan: Using Vanta to Track Incidents
With your plan and processes defined, you need to implement them. Vanta helps here by integrating with your incident tracking tools to ensure incidents are logged, resolved, and evidenced for compliance. Follow these steps to operationalize your IRP using Vanta’s features:
Connect Incident Tracking Integrations: Vanta integrates with popular ticketing and incident management systems, including Jira. Go to Integrations in Vanta and connect your incident tracking tool. For example, if you use Jira for incident tickets or post-mortems, integrate it with Vanta’s Jira connector. This enables Vanta to retrieve information about incident tickets automatically.
Configure Incident Tags/Labels: Within the integration settings, configure which tickets Vanta should treat as “incidents.” In Jira, you can label incident tickets with a tag like 'incident' or use a specific project for incidents. Vanta lets you specify these labels or use JQL queries to filter the tickets. For instance, you can set “Incident Management” labels and “Incident Resolution” labels in Vanta’s integration settings to capture both the tracking of active incidents and their resolution tasks.
Automatically Monitor Incident Tickets: Once configured, Vanta will start importing incident tickets from your tracker. It collects key details like title, status, created date, and closed date for each incident ticket In the Tests page of Vanta, you’ll see automated tests (checks) such as “Incident Management Tasks Completed” and “Incident Resolution Tasks Completed” These tests continuously verify your incident tickets to ensure that:
All incidents are being addressed. Vanta will list any open or unresolved incident tickets, alerting you to follow up so that nothing slips through the cracks.
Incidents are resolved promptly: By checking the closed dates, Vanta can demonstrate that incidents were resolved and how long it took, which you can present to auditors to show compliance with your policy.
Maintain an Audit Trail: Vanta’s integration essentially creates an audit trail of your incident handling. Each imported ticket serves as evidence that you identified an incident, took action, and completed remediation. Auditors (for SOC 2 or ISO certifications) will often request proof of incident management. With Vanta, you can easily access the list of incidents and their resolutions, eliminating the need to search through spreadsheets or emails. This directly supports SOC 2 requirements by demonstrating that you follow a defined incident process in practice.
Integrate Other Tools as Needed: In addition to Jira, Vanta integrates with various tools, including alerting systems, on-call management, and dedicated incident management platforms. If you use a tool like Incident.io or PagerDuty, check Vanta’s integrations library for an available integration under “Incident management”. By connecting all relevant systems, Vanta can serve as your single pane of glass to monitor security operations.
With these integrations, operational execution of your IRP becomes part of your continuous compliance. As team members carry out incident response tasks (creating tickets, updating statuses, resolving issues), Vanta automatically collects that evidence and flags any deviations, such as unresolved incidents. This means your IRP isn’t just a document—it’s an active, living process that Vanta helps you enforce and track in real-time.
In your IRP document, note the tools and integrations you use (e.g., “Incidents are tracked in Jira and synced to Vanta”). This reminds your team to follow the process (e.g., always create a Jira ticket for an incident) so that Vanta can monitor it. Vanta can also automatically create Jira tickets for specific alerts or tests if workflow automation is enabled, helping ensure issues are captured promptly.
Test, Review, and Continuously Improve the Plan
Creating an IRP is not a one-and-done task. Both standards and real-world best practices demand regular testing and refinement of your incident response process. Vanta supports this by helping you schedule, document, and learn from tests and actual incidents:
Conduct Regular Incident Response Drills: Aim to test your incident response plan at least annually. SOC 2 requires an annual incident response plan test, and it is also recommended by ISO/NIST. You can perform a tabletop exercise where your team walks through a simulated incident scenario, or a live drill (e.g., simulate a ransomware attack). Document the date of the test, who participated, the scenario, and the lessons learned. Vanta allows you to upload evidence of these tests. For example, you might create a Jira ticket for the tabletop exercise (tagged as an incident) and mark it resolved with notes on what was learned. This ticket would sync to Vanta, showing an incident that was handled (in this case, a test incident) as proof that you carried out a drill. Alternatively, you can attach a report or memo from the exercise to the relevant control in Vanta.
Verify and Update the Plan Based on Tests: After each test or real incident, hold a post-incident review. Identify what went well and what needs improvement (Were roles clear? Did communication flow smoothly? Were any steps missing?). Update your IRP document in Vanta to incorporate these lessons. For example, if a drill revealed that a backup contact was missing for an incident lead, add that to the plan. Vanta’s Policy Builder makes it easy to edit the policy and have it re-approved by stakeholders so you always have an up-to-date plan.
Track Improvement Metrics: Over time, use data from Vanta and your incident tickets to measure progress and gauge improvement. Metrics such as mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), and the total number of incidents over a period can indicate whether your controls are adequate. If Vanta’s incident integration shows that incidents are consistently resolved within, say, 24 hours (and this is improving), that’s a good sign. If a metric like' incidents over time” is trending upward, you may need to invest in prevention or additional training. Include these metrics in management reports and consider adding goals for them in your plan.
Ensure Continuous Compliance: Vanta will continuously monitor the status of your IRP-related controls. For instance, if your IRP document has not been updated in over a year, or if an annual test is overdue, those controls may appear as failing or require attention. Leverage Vanta’s Alerts/Tasks to remind you of upcoming reviews : you can set a task in Vanta (or a calendar reminder) for your annual IRP drill. This proactive stance ensures you maintain compliance with frameworks like SOC 2 year-round, not just right before an audit.
Remember that incident response planning is an iterative process. By regularly testing your plan and using Vanta’s tools to capture the outcomes, you create a feedback loop: each incident (or drill) makes your following response better.
Best Practice: After a significant incident or annual test, consider holding a brief training or update session with the broader organization. Share lessons learned or changes to the IRP. This keeps everyone security-aware and reinforces the culture of continuous improvement.
By following these steps in Vanta, you’ll have an action-oriented Incident Response Plan that is thoroughly documented, actively used, and continuously monitored. You’ll also align with industry standards and satisfy compliance requirements by showing auditors that you not only have a plan on paper but also a proven process in practice. With clearly defined roles, well-established communication protocols, integrated incident tracking, and ongoing tests and updates, your team will be well-prepared to tackle security incidents swiftly and effectively, turning your IRP into a living program that protects your organization and builds trust with