Why Most Incident Response Plans Are Useless—and What That Means for Your Business
Imagine your office catches fire. The alarm goes off. Everyone panics. You grab your incident plan from the binder on the wall. You flip to the page titled Fire Evacuation Procedure. It’s beautifully formatted. It’s got logos, bullet points, and legal boilerplate.
But there’s just one problem.
It doesn’t say where the exits are.
It doesn’t say who to call.
And it doesn’t list who’s even supposed to be leading the evacuation.
That’s the equivalent of what I see when I review most cyber incident response plans today.
Just this past week, a well-meaning compliance officer proudly handed me their organization’s “Incident Response Plan.” It looked great. It had policies. It had playbooks. It had everything… except actual instructions that would help you survive an attack.
They didn’t list:
- Who’s on the response team.
- How to contact them.
- What assets need to be recovered first.
- Where the backups are.
- Who their cyber insurance provider is.
- Or even how to reach their IT vendor.
In short, they had policy without a plan. A roadmap with no roads. It was like pulling out the emergency card on an airplane—only to find it doesn’t list any exits, no oxygen masks, no instructions. Just a pretty diagram and a false sense of security.
When a Breach Happens, Time Isn’t on Your Side
Let’s talk reality.
When a ransomware attack hits, you don’t get time to figure things out. Every minute costs you:
- Revenue – Your systems are down. No sales. No billing. No operations.
- Reputation – Your clients find out before you do. And they’re not impressed.
- Compliance exposure – If personal or financial data leaks, the lawsuits begin.
- Cyber insurance fallout – Your claim may be denied if you didn’t follow the plan you swore was in place.
The clock doesn’t care about your policies. It only cares whether your team can act. And if they’re flipping through 30 pages trying to find a phone number? You’ve already lost.
Why CEOs and CFOs Must Care (Yes, You Personally)
You might think this is an IT problem. It’s not. This is a business continuity problem. It’s an existential risk.
Let me put it in financial terms: the average ransomware payout last year was $1.5 million. The average downtime was three weeks. The average recovery cost was $4.5 million, once you factor in lost customers, regulatory fines, legal fees, and PR clean-up.
And that’s just the average. I’ve personally worked on incidents where the business didn’t recover. It’s game over.
Now here’s the kicker: many of these organizations thought they were ready. They had policies. They had binders. They had reports they’d shown their board. But when it came time to execute? The plan failed them.
They had a plan on paper. Not in practice.
The 3 Non-Negotiables of a Real Incident Response Plan
Here’s what your business actually needs—no fluff:
- Clarity for Real People Under Real Stress
The plan must be simple, clear, and usable by everyone—from your receptionist to your COO. Assume your IT systems are down. Assume people are working from their phones. Can your team still execute? If not, start over.
- Details About the Business, Not Just the Tech
What do we need to recover first? Who owns what? Where are our backups stored? What vendors do we call? What systems can we survive without? These aren’t tech questions—they’re business questions. And your plan needs real answers.
- It Must Be Built—and Tested—By People With Scars
If the person writing your plan has never led a breach response, it’s not a plan. It’s a theory. You need someone who’s been in the trenches, who knows how these situations unfold minute-by-minute. Then you need to run a tabletop exercise—simulate a breach and see what breaks.
Spoiler alert: something will break. And that’s good. Because you want it to break during a drill—not during a breach.
The Bottom Line: Plans That Haven’t Been Tested Are Legal Liabilities
If your incident response plan hasn’t been tested, it doesn’t exist. Period.
And when the lawsuits come—and they will—it’s not going to be your IT person on the stand. It’ll be you.
You’ll be asked:
- Did you have a response plan?
- Was it tested?
- Could your team actually execute it?
If the answer to any of those questions is “no,” that’s negligence. That’s breach of fiduciary duty. That’s personal liability for every executive who signed off on the plan.
Here’s What You Do Next
- Pull out your current incident response plan.
Don’t look at the cover page. Open to the guts. Ask yourself: can we actually follow this if everything’s down?
- Identify what’s missing.
Are contact numbers in there? Are recovery steps clear? Would you know what to do if you were the first person to see the alert?
- Test it.
Run a tabletop exercise with your leadership team. Simulate an attack. Time it. Watch what happens.
If you can’t do those three things, don’t sleep until you fix it.
Because the breach is coming. You don’t get to choose if. Only when. And whether or not your business survives.
