the environment, or the security of the state”.
● Atlassian defines a major incident as “an emergency-level outage or loss of service”
● LawInsider.com defines major incident in different ways even on the same web page, including “an occurrence of catastrophic proportions, resulting from the use of plant or machinery, or from activities at a workplace” and “an incident associated with the Distribution of electricity, which results in a significant interruption of service, substantial damage to equipment, or loss of life or significant injury to human beings, or as otherwise directed by the Commission”.
While these definitions are quite different, at their core they share a few commonalities. A major incident is an event, or series of events, that impacts what’s typically considered regular or normal circumstances. The impacts of major incidents can indeed be catastrophic, or they can just be as comparatively inconsequential as an interruption of service. The commonality to all major incidents is that they invariably need someone to take action, whether it’s to prevent a disaster or restore a service.
How do you define major incidents?
Now that you have an idea of what a major incident is, it’s time to consider how to define a major incident for your business.
It would be impossible to provide a one-and-done definition of what a major incident is for your business without being in your shoes. What you see and how you respond to incidents in your everyday operations is different from the next person, and how the business is managed
.
and its goals can be an integral part of
knowing which incidents are major, and which aren’t.
So, think about the last incident you dealt with that may be considered major.
Does it check off any of the below boxes? If it does, it was likely a major incident.
● Did the incident put anyone at risk for harm?
● Did the incident pose a threat to customers' personal or data security?
● Did the incident put the business at risk of losing customers?
● Did the incident put the business at risk of losing new sales?
● Did the incident put the business at risk of losing employees?
● Did the incident pose a financial loss?
● Did the incident impact regular business operations?
● Did the incident require human intervention to resolve?
Consider the example at the beginning of this article “a broken freezer leaking artisanal vegan ice cream”.
You probably didn’t think this was a major incident. But, it would have put a business at risk of losing new sales, it would have had financial costs in lost product, and it would have impacted regular operations. In
truth, if someone slipped and fell, it also could have opened the business up for a significant lawsuit for putting a customer's safety at risk.
So, while it’s not fair to say that a hurricane