Incident Response (IR): The Difference Between a Speedbump and a Shutdown

How a 24-Hour Plan Can Save a 24-Month Contract

It usually doesn’t start with alarms blaring. No… it starts with something small. A machinist can’t open a drawing. An engineer notices files acting strangely. The IT lead gets a call that email is “acting weird.”

By the time anyone realizes what’s happening, the ERP system is frozen and the production schedule for a defense part is dead in the water. Your prime contractor is waiting on delivery, and your shop floor is waiting on instructions.

Now leadership is in the hot seat:

• Do you shut everything down and risk production delays?

• Do you keep running and risk spreading the attack?

• Who calls the customer? Who talks to insurance? Who do we need to notify? Who documents what’s happening?

In this industry, you don’t lose contracts because you got hacked, you lose them because you couldn’t prove you had a plan, acted on it, and kept control of the situation.

That’s what incident response really is: not a binder on a shelf, but the playbook that protects your business when the clock is ticking.

What Meeting the Objectives Might Look Like

At CMMC Level 2, incident response isn’t about having a glossy binder full of procedures. Auditors are looking for evidence that you’ve built a practical, working process your team can actually follow, which usually means:

• A written plan that people understand: not 40 pages of boilerplate, but a few clear steps that spell out who does what when something goes wrong.

• Defined incident categories: you’ve thought about common scenarios (phishing, ransomware, unauthorized access, insider misuse) and listed them in your plan.

• Trained employees who know how to report: everyone in the company knows how to raise a flag and who to call first.

• Evidence of testing: you’ve run at least one tabletop exercise or drill and kept notes showing what worked and what didn’t.

• Documented response activity: when incidents do happen (and they will), you’ve kept records showing what actions were taken, by whom, and when.

• Clear communications: both internal (IT, leadership, staff) and external (customers, primes, maybe even DoD reps) know how and when they’ll be notified.

The auditor doesn’t expect perfection. They’re checking that you’re ready, practiced, and able to prove it when the time comes.

Your Biggest Risk Isn’t Attackers, It’s Hesitation

For small businesses in the Defense Industrial Base, incident response isn’t just a “compliance requirement.” It’s the difference between losing critical data or keeping it safe…  bleeding revenue or getting back online… burning trust or strengthening it. For small businesses, it can mean the line between a temporary setback and a business-ending event. It’s the difference between keeping contracts and watching them slip away. Here’s why it matters:

• Contracts are on the line. Primes and the DoD expect you to be able to respond to incidents quickly and confidently. If you can’t, they’ll move their business to someone who can.

• Downtime is expensive. Every day your production floor sits idle, you’re paying wages, losing output, and risking penalties on delivery schedules.

• Reputation is fragile. Word travels fast in the defense ecosystem. A poorly handled incident can make you the contractor everyone whispers about for all the wrong reasons.

• Insurance depends on it. Cyber insurers increasingly ask for proof of incident response planning. No plan means higher premiums or no coverage at all.

• Resilience saves money. A rehearsed plan shrinks the chaos, reduces mistakes, and gets you back to work faster. The less time you spend in recovery mode, the less money you burn.

At the end of the day, primes don’t expect you to be bulletproof. They expect you to be prepared and professional when, not if, an incident happens. That’s what builds trust, keeps contracts alive, and protects your bottom line.

Where Most Companies Slip Up

Even with the best intentions, many small businesses in the defense space stumble when it comes to incident response. The most common pitfalls we see are:

• The Shelf Plan: Writing a 30-page IR policy once, never updating it, and hoping it’s good enough. Auditors and primes can tell when a plan hasn’t been touched in years.

• Unclear Roles: In the heat of an incident, nobody knows who’s actually in charge. IT blames leadership, leadership blames IT, and nothing gets done quickly.

• Communication Breakdowns: Staff don’t know how to report an incident, or leaders forget to notify customers and primes until it’s too late.

• Lack of Evidence: Incidents are handled “informally” with no logs or documentation. Without a paper trail, you can’t prove you met requirements.

• Over-Complication: Fancy playbooks written in consultant-speak that no one in your shop floor, IT team, or office could realistically follow at 2:00 a.m.

• No Practice: The first time the plan is tested is during a real incident. Spoiler: that’s when you find the gaps the hard way.

The good news? Every one of these pitfalls is avoidable with a simple, practical, and practiced plan that your team can actually use.

How to Start Strong (and Grow Stronger)

The key with incident response is not complexity, it’s clarity. You don’t need a binder full of legal jargon. You need a playbook your people can actually follow under pressure.

A Starting Point

If you’re just getting started, aim for:

• Write a simple IR plan: Two to three pages max, outlining who does what, how to report, and the basic steps to contain incidents.

• Assign an incident response lead (and a backup): Someone with the authority to make decisions quickly.

• Train your employees: Make sure everyone knows how to report suspicious activity and who to notify.

• Run a tabletop exercise: Gather your team around the conference table, walk through a mock phishing email or ransomware attack, and record what you did.

• Keep logs: Whether from your firewall, antivirus, or cloud systems. Document when you investigated and what you did.

This is usually enough to get through an assessment and show auditors you’ve thought it through.

The NEX Level (Maturity That Builds Resilience)

Once the basics are in place, take it further to actually protect your business:

• Automate detection & alerts: Use your security tools to flag suspicious activity so incidents are caught earlier.

• Tier your incidents: Define what’s minor, major, or crisis-level, with clear escalation paths.

• Run quarterly exercises: Rotate scenarios (phishing, ransomware, insider misuse) so the team stays sharp and leadership gets practice making calls.

• Integrate with business continuity: Connect your IR plan to disaster recovery, backups, and communication workflows so recovery is seamless.

• Establish external partners: Line up a managed detection and response (MDR) provider or IR retainer so you’re not scrambling to hire help in the middle of a crisis.

• Measure and improve: After every drill or real incident, run a lessons-learned session and update the plan.

Compliance gets you a checkmark. The NEX Level gets you confidence, speed, and trust, the things customers and partners value most when everything’s on the line.

The Fire Drill Lesson

Think back to grade school. When the fire alarm rang, you didn’t pull out a 40-page manual, debate what to do, or wait for someone to “figure it out.” You already knew. Why? Because you had practiced. You lined up in the hallway, filed out to the parking lot, and waited for the all-clear. Over and over, until it was second nature.

That’s the essence of incident response. It’s not about creating the most polished binder of policies, it’s about creating muscle memory for your business.

When a cyber incident hits, panic is your biggest enemy. Employees freeze, leaders debate, time ticks away. Every minute lost means more data stolen, more systems locked, more dollars burned. Just like a fire, the damage spreads until someone takes decisive action.

The companies that bounce back aren’t the ones with the fanciest technology. They’re the ones who practiced. They know:

• Who pulls the alarm (reports the incident)

• Who leads the evacuation (the IR lead with authority)

• Where people go (clear escalation paths and communication channels)

• What happens afterward (documentation, recovery, and lessons learned)

And here’s the kicker: the drill itself is valuable even if the “fire” never comes. Running through a tabletop exercise builds confidence in your team, strengthens trust across departments, and often uncovers simple fixes (like out-of-date contact lists or unclear roles) that save time when the real thing happens.

Takeaway: A fire drill doesn’t stop fires, but it saves lives. In the same way, an incident response plan won’t stop attacks, but it will save your data, your time, your revenue, and the trust that keeps contracts flowing.

Helpful Resources

Cybersecurity can feel overwhelming, especially when standards like CMMC reference dense NIST documents and technical jargon. The good news is, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are credible, practical resources you can lean on to make incident response achievable – from official DoD and NIST guidance to simple checklists and exercises designed with small businesses in mind.

Think of this section as your launchpad: a curated mix of references and hands-on aids to help you move from theory into action. Whether you’re building your first response plan or looking for ways to take your preparedness to the NEX Level, these tools will give you both clarity and momentum.

Here are some places to dig deeper and take practical next steps:

Framework & Standards

• DoD CMMC Resources – Official documentation from the DoD covering CMMC Model v2.0.
• NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2 – Full text from NIST, the source standard that CMMC maps to.
• DFARS 252.204-7012 — The DoD clause requiring contractors to report cyber incidents within 72 hours. Understanding this is critical to staying compliant with contracts.
• NIST SP 800-61r2 — The Computer Security Incident Handling Guide. Offers step-by-step best practices for preparing, detecting, responding, and recovering from incidents.
• NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF)  — A broad framework mapping incident response into “Respond” and “Recover” functions, useful for aligning your business strategy.

Free Resources

• CISA Tabletop Exercise Packages (TTX) — Ready-to-use scenarios (ransomware, phishing, supply chain) you can run internally to test your plan.
• SANS Cybersecurity Posters and Cheat Sheets — Consolidated complex cybersecurity challenges and solutions into quickly consumable, actionable intelligence.
• MS-ISAC Incident Response Guides — Practical templates and playbooks designed specifically for resource-constrained organizations.
• CISA Cybersecurity Incident & Vulnerability Response Playbooks — Federal-level IR and vulnerability response playbooks you can adapt for small business scale.
• MITRE ATT&CK — A globally recognized knowledge base of real-world adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). It helps organizations understand how attackers operate, anticipate likely incident scenarios, and align detection and response plans to actual threats.

Paid Resources

• Managed Detection & Response (MDR): Outsourced 24/7 monitoring and response, ideal for small businesses without an in-house SOC.
• Incident Response Retainers: Pre-arranged contracts with cyber firms that guarantee experts are available when you have an incident.
• Forensic Services: Specialists who can dig into what happened, collect evidence for insurance or legal needs, and recommend fixes.
• Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs): Broader outsourced security providers who can bundle monitoring, response, and compliance support.
• Incident Response Software Platforms (e.g., CYYNC, PagerDuty, Swimlane): Tools to coordinate alerts, tasks, and workflows during a live incident.

CyberNEX Resources

• CMMC Decoded: Incident Response Reference Sheet – A concise one-page guide for defense contractors that outlines the AT control family, explains why it matters, highlights examples of evidence auditors might expect, provides quick-win actions to get started, and includes links to available resources.
• CyberNEX Blog Archive – Explore all 14 CMMC control families with in-depth explainers, practical recommendations, and actionable insights tailored to defense contractors.
• CYYNC Platform — Centralizes incident response by linking incidents, assets, tasks, and evidence in one place. Supports automation, clear audit trails, and repeatable playbooks, turning IR from ad hoc chaos into a process you can prove and improve.

Take the NEXt Step

Don’t wait for a breach to test your plan.

Incidents don’t just risk your data, they threaten your time, revenue, contracts, and reputation. A clear, practiced incident response plan turns chaos into confidence when it matters most.

👉 Get clarity on your compliance gaps and a clear plan forward. Book a Discovery Session with our experts today.

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FAQs

1. What does CMMC actually require for incident response?
At Level 2, CMMC expects you to have a documented incident response (IR) plan, clear roles and responsibilities, and evidence that you’ve trained staff and tested the plan. You’ll also need to show records of past incidents or exercises. In short: not perfection, but proof that you’re prepared and practiced.

2. How quickly do we need to report an incident to the DoD?
Under DFARS 252.204-7012, any cyber incident that affects Covered Defense Information (CDI) must be reported to the DoD within 72 hours of discovery. That clock starts ticking fast, which is why having a clear plan and defined responsibilities is so critical.

3. What’s the difference between incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity?

• Incident Response (IR): How you detect, contain, and communicate during a cyber incident.
• Disaster Recovery (DR): How you restore IT systems and data after the incident.
• Business Continuity (BCP): How you keep the business running (production, contracts, operations) while IT systems are disrupted.

They overlap, but IR comes first, it’s the bridge between “we have a problem” and “we’re back online.”

4. Why does incident response matter if we already have firewalls, backups, and antivirus?
Firewalls and backups are prevention and recovery tools. But when something slips through, and it will, you need a plan to detect it, stop it, and communicate fast. Firewalls don’t tell your staff who to call. Backups don’t notify your prime contractor. Antivirus doesn’t log your response actions for an assessor. That’s why IR fills the gap.

5. Who should own the incident response process in a small business?
Typically, the responsibility falls to the IT manager or outsourced IT/security provider, with a designated business leader as backup. But ownership doesn’t mean they do it alone, the IR lead coordinates across leadership, operations, and staff. The most important part is making sure everyone knows who’s in charge when the alarm sounds.