Enterprise Operations & Incident Management Topics
Large-scale operational practices for enterprise systems including major incident response, crisis leadership, enterprise-scale troubleshooting, business continuity planning, and recovery. Covers coordination across teams during high-severity incidents, forensic investigation, decision-making under pressure, post-incident processes, and resilience architecture. Distinct from Security & Compliance in its focus on operational coordination and recovery rather than preventive security.
Root Cause Analysis and Corrective Actions
Covers methods and practices for identifying and eliminating the underlying causes of incidents and problems, and for ensuring effective remediation. Topics include structured analysis techniques such as five whys and fishbone diagrams, causal factor mapping, and evidence gathering to move beyond surface symptoms to systemic root causes like control gaps, training deficiencies, process defects, unclear policies, cultural issues, or supervisory failures. Includes postmortem practices such as blameless facilitation, creating psychological safety so people speak openly, designing postmortem templates, documenting findings, and avoiding postmortem fatigue by applying proportional review. Covers designing, prioritizing, tracking, and verifying corrective actions and remediation plans, including metrics and acceptance criteria for when an action is considered effective. Senior level skills include facilitating cross functional postmortems, establishing governance and feedback loops, converting incident learnings into continuous improvement, balancing quick fixes with long term prevention, and building systems to ensure remediation ownership and ongoing measurement.
Enterprise Risk and Vulnerability Assessment
Assessing risk at an organizational or enterprise scale, including governance vulnerabilities, compliance exposures, systemic operational risks, and cross functional dependencies. Candidates should describe methodologies for enterprise wide risk identification, prioritization, vulnerability scanning, remediation planning, communicating urgent risks to leadership, and aligning mitigation efforts across business units. Examples include identifying regulatory compliance gaps, third party risks, and enterprise security vulnerabilities and driving prioritized remediation.
Risk Identification Assessment and Mitigation
Comprehensive practices for proactively identifying, assessing, prioritizing, managing, mitigating, and planning responses to risks across technical, operational, financial, regulatory, security, privacy, and market domains. Candidates should be able to describe methods to surface risks including brainstorming, historical analysis, dependency mapping, scenario analysis, stakeholder interviews, and threat modeling; apply qualitative and quantitative assessment techniques such as probability and impact scoring, risk matrices and heat maps, expected loss calculations, and simulation where appropriate; and use prioritization approaches that reflect risk appetite, tolerance, and cost benefit trade offs. The topic covers selection and design of mitigation options including avoidance, reduction, transfer, and acceptance; preventive, detective, corrective, and compensating controls; layered defense strategies; and domain specific safeguards such as encryption, access controls, logging, data minimization, retention policies, vendor agreements, and incident response planning. It also includes contingency and recovery planning for exposures that cannot be fully mitigated, including defining triggers, contingency actions, owners, contingency budgets and schedule reserves, rollback and fallback strategies, and measurable monitoring indicators. Candidates should be prepared to explain how to create and maintain risk registers, assign owners, monitor and report residual risk, measure control effectiveness over time, align risk activities with architecture and compliance, make trade offs between prevention and contingency, and communicate and escalate risk information to stakeholders and leadership across project and program lifecycles.
Breach Response Procedures and Protocols
Detailed breach response procedures including incident detection mechanisms, immediate containment steps, evidence preservation and chain of custody, forensic investigation coordination, communication protocols, stakeholder notification procedures (internal escalation, executive notification, board notification), and post-incident review. Understanding roles and responsibilities (security team, legal, privacy, communications, executives). Timeline and sequence of critical actions.