Top 7 reasons incident response plans fail

Incident response plans can fall apart when faced with real-world security events. Learn about the gaps that can lead to failure and how to avoid them.

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• Jaikumar Vijayan

Like the best-laid plans of mice and men, even the best-intentioned cybersecurity incident response plans can go awry. When they do, the consequences can be ugly, as many organizations have discovered in recent years.

A 2025 survey of 1,700 IT and engineering professionals by New Relic reported that high-impact IT outages now carry a median cost of $2 million per hour -- roughly $33,000 every minute -- and result in annual losses averaging $76 million per organization. The longer an incident drags on, the greater the damage. IBM's "Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025" found that breaches contained within 200 days averaged $3.87 million in losses, compared with $5.01 million when detection ...