What is an Incident?

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) defines an incident as 'An unplanned interruption to a service or a reduction in the quality of a service'. An incident is an unexpected event or disruption that disturbs the regular operations in IT systems. It can encompass technical glitches, errors, or security breaches that hinder service delivery.

Example
1. Network Outage: A critical network infrastructure component fails, leading to a widespread loss of connectivity across the organisation.
Impact of the incident: Employees are unable to access essential applications, communication is disrupted, and business operations come to a halt.

2. Software Application Failure: An HR application experiences a malfunction, preventing employees from accessing essential HR services, such as submitting time-off requests or updating personal information, etc.
Impact of the incident: Employees are unable to perform HR-related tasks, potentially leading to payroll errors or delays.

3. Legal and Compliance Incident: The document management system used by the legal and compliance team experiences a security vulnerability, that may potentially lead to exposing sensitive legal documents.
Impact of the incident: There is a risk of unauthorized access to confidential legal information.

In all the above cases, The IT service desk or the respective support teams receives a surge in incident reports. The IT support team must quickly identify and resolve the issue, possibly involving collaboration with other service desk teams, network engineers and vendors to restore the services and to resolve the incidents.

What is Incident Management?

Incident Management is an ITSM process, where the main purpose is to restore the normal service operations up and running as quickly as possible so as to reduce the impact of the incidents across the services.

Incident management is one of the key aspects of Service Desk and, when practiced or implemented correctly will have an enormous impact on how an organisation manages their IT operations. Issues, service disruptions may arise everyday in an organisation which will require timely attention and resolution by the respective teams. Efficiently logging and managing incidents is crucial for maintaining smooth business operations, ensuring end-user satisfaction, and minimizing downtime. HappyFox Service Desk offers various methods for incident creation and managing, thereby providing flexibility and convenience to both End-Users, Agents, Admins of the various business and technical teams.

Example
Consider a scenario in an organisation where an employee encounters issues accessing critical software. They raise an incident through the Service Desk platform, specifying the urgency as "High" due to the impact on their daily tasks. The incident is automatically routed to the IT Support team responsible for software-related issues. The IT Admins quickly assess the incident, identify the cause, and resolve it within a short time. As a result, the employee's productivity is restored, and potential disruptions to business operations are averted.