Feeling zen, finding DORA, and the policy police

Hello, again!

We’ve had a bumper month here at incident.io HQ. We’ve welcomed 3 new joiners, celebrated two 1 year incident.io anniversaries (congrats Lisa and Lawrence!), released a whole load of exciting new features and (for those of you wondering what’s been causing the recent heatwave) we’ve redesigned our website and it is on fire 🔥 😎

Here’s a round-up of some of this month's highlights…

Introducing our new Zendesk integration

We’re big believers that incidents are a whole organization event, not the exclusive realm of engineering. One team that is particularly important to involve in the incident process is Customer Support. They’re on the frontline of your response - leading the charge into battle as customers vent their frustrations.

Inevitably, things will sometimes go wrong, but equipped with the right information Customer Support agents have the power to turn a gnarly incident into a positive customer experience and brand loyalty.

Always on hand to make your life that bit easier, next week we’ll be shipping our new Zendesk integration which allows you to sync up between Engineering and Customer Support, helping you to make sure your customers are kept up to date in realtime 🔜

Calling the (policy) police 🚨

Could there be anything more exciting than a good policy? No, we didn’t think so either. So brace yourselves because we’ve just released our new Policies feature.

Policies allow you to encode your company’s commitments (things like incident closure rates, follow-up completions and action tracking) and customise these for different incident types and severity levels. We’ll notify you if you’re behind on any of these policies - helping your team to consistently stay within agreed targets (e.g. service level agreements and regulatory requirements). We also help you to track your performance over time (e.g. tracking policy breaches).

And if that hasn’t got you on the edge of your seat, I don’t know what will.

Hot off the press 🔥

Finding DORA 🐠

Ever find that reading 113 pages of legislation seems to give you short-term memory loss? 🥴 Never fear, because we’ve summarised the Digital Operational Resilience Act (or DORA for short) for you.

DORA is legislation being passed by the European Commission to address technology risks in the financial services sector. It will have implications for how you deal with incident management. In a nutshell, DORA will require you to identify sources of incidents and implement strategies to protect your systems. It also has measures that enforce bringing systems back online in a timely manner and improving the communication with both internal and external stakeholders. All of this whilst increasing senior management involvement in incident management - there’s a lot to do!

If you operate in the financial services sector, it will almost certainly apply to you, but it'll also apply to any organizations operating critical supporting services – things like cloud infrastructure and data analytics.

For full details, check out this blog post.

Talking Slight Reliability

If you’re looking for something to listen to on your morning commute, then you’ll be pleased to hear that Chris Evans is at it again, sharing his pearls of wisdom on how to have better incidents. This month, he’s been chatting to Stephen Townshend at Slight Reliability about using incidents to lift the lid on an organization, how aiming for zero incidents can stall an organization, and how tracking MTTR is unhelpful. Give it a listen here and let us know what you think.

And finally…

As a treat for those of you that have got this far - hot on the heels of our DORA post, our second most popular piece of content this month…

Who says producing good content has to be hard work?

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