How Ziglu standardised incidents with incident.io

Ziglu is a UK and EU regulated e-money issuer, offering a variety of digital finance services. It is particularly well known for its cryptocurrency services.

Ziglu currently has around 70 employees, with an engineering team of 20.

The challenge

Operating in a highly regulated industry where meeting compliance standards is critical and the threat of fraud or security attacks is high, a robust incident management process is essential to Ziglu’s business. However, before using incident.io, the Ziglu team found that they lacked a consistent, transparent way to create and run incidents.

It was pretty rudimentary, pretty ad-hoc. Sometimes it would be a bunch of random DMs flying between people, sometimes it might happen in a Slack channel. Sometimes it would be several Slack channels. There might be back channels going on. Occasionally, there might be a call, but usually it was pretty disorganized. There was no real decent process in place, quite honestly.

Ziglu’s hybrid working model made getting a more structured approach to incident management even more important, requiring tools and rituals to make sure that the team was able to collaborate and communicate effectively.

The solution

Improved discoverability for stakeholders

Previously, the team responding to incidents at Ziglu found themselves spending a lot of time re-iterating incident status updates to various stakeholders. This reduced the amount of time available to spend actually fixing the issue.

incident.io has helped to resolve these issues by providing a clear and consistent way to surface mission critical information, making it easily accessible to all relevant stakeholders (including Customer Ops, Marketing, Financial Crime and others).

Previously in incidents, we’d sometimes have to reiterate the incident timeline and current status 4-5 times as different people joined the incident. Now, people rarely ask and just read the timeline. Even if they do ask, we can just point to the timeline unless we’ve missed recording something specific they want to learn about.

Improved visibility for active responders

A lack of structure meant that in the past, the team struggled to track down key pieces of information both during and after incidents, leading to poor overall visibility. Getting up to speed with an incident that was already in flight proved particularly difficult. The structure provided by incident.io now enables the team to easily find the latest information, making it easier to jump in to support or handover smoothly where needed.

One of my favourite features is the web-based timeline dashboard… sifting through Slack is a pain so being able to just go and look on the timeline and pull out the key things that people have flagged as interesting is massively valuable.

Better process consistency has enabled incident democratisation

incident.io provides the guardrails and automation that Ziglu needed to bring consistency to their process. Instead of having to remember what actions to take under which circumstances, relying on scraps of paper to record steps which need to be taken, the team is now guided through an intuitive process which prompts the right actions at the right time.

Before, we were trying to create a Slack channel per incident, just to have some sense of a place that people could go and discover it…But even then, people would forget to post updates in there. It wasn't always clear what was going on.

This standardisation means that the team now sees four times as many individuals able to declare and run incidents, rather than relying on 1 or 2 defacto commanders.

Improved insights into tech stack

incident.io has provided the team at Ziglu with critical insights into their tech stack that has enabled them to make informed decisions about where improvements need to be made, contributing to an overall improvement in business resilience and performance.