Write a paper that provides a detailed incident-response plan (IRP) for a breach. As a governance professional, you must design an IRP that aligns with your organization’s requirements and industry best practices. This means you have policies and procedures that adhere to regulatory requirements and industry standards. It also means that the IRP contains technical and policy knowledge about the relevant laws, regulations, and contractual obligations such as data breach notification laws and industry-specific regulations.
Demonstrating effective governance means establishing multidisciplinary teams with cross-functional capabilities. This type of work structure requires senior management, IT teams, legal counsel, and compliance officers to work together to help you communicate with stakeholders about the cybersecurity breach and explain how the company manages it. Once the breach is found, it must be immediately contained, so rapid, effective communication is paramount.

Write a 10- to 12-page IRP. It must be well-structured and easy to understand. It should require regular review, updates, and testing. It also should ensure that employees understand how to recognize and report cybersecurity incidents promptly and accurately. If you discuss technology, it is fine to list options such as automated detection and response technology, or enhanced detection and response, for example. It is more important for the executive team and as a governance practice, however, that you also explain the complexitiesT of integrating ever-changing technology into a system or network. Your analysis should demonstrate how you plan to continually upgrade your practices and document them to show compliance.
You may create your IRP any way you choose, as long as all elements of the prompt are covered. The following is a recommended way to do it:
1. Research: Before conducting research, read the prompts below. Review the Unit 2 Learning Resources. In Unit 1 Learning Resources, “The Ultimate Guide to Cybersecurity Planning for Businesses” is a good article on what businesses look at in considering a cybersecurity plan. Revisit the key federal documents or laws that govern responding to a data breach in your industry. You will not need to cite these laws, but you must explain which one governs your industry sector and what you must do to show compliance with the specific law. That explanation can be as simple as “United Health Care is in compliance with HIPAA data requirements, and our IRP team will review the checklist to make sure that we are managing personal health data and personal financial data under HIPAA regulations.”
2. Outline: During and after the research phase, outline your IRP.
3. Writing: Once you understand the topic, write out a plan for your industry. For many businesses, it is a new function to have a detailed strategy, a risk management approach, an IRP, and the incorporation of that into their governance structure in an extremely specific and tactical way. For that and other reasons, providing solid analysis to support your recommendations is critical for corporate and employee buy-in, so that the organization follows the requirements and so that you get a budget supported by other company divisions for your work.
Make sure that your IRP addresses each of the following prompts:
1. Policies for data access, legal and regulatory requirements, and/or other industry standards:
a. State and explain the organizational policies and procedures for data and information access.
b. List and explain several legal and regulatory requirements that apply to your chosen industry.
c. Provide additional information on a governing body and/or other industry standards that apply.
2. Provide a detailed timeline of the various departments in the organization with their corresponding roles and responsibilities to respond to an incident, including specific hours/weeks and other time-sensitive information needed for the response to be effective.
3. Map the business to key NIST or other industry best practices to demonstrate compliance:
a. List company policies such as access control, recovery procedures, and restoration procedures, and analyze how to map them to NIST or another IR protocol
b. Discuss improvements (e.g., continuous training, updated internal controls, buying software or hardware, and contracting with third-party vendors for additional monitoring), and analyze how they would help.