Handling an incident is hard. Even more so when you’re worried about discussing a sensitive topic in a public forum such as an incident channel. Perhaps it is a sensitive legal question, an HR complaint, or a security hole that needs closing.
Private incidents help solve this. If there is any doubt over the nature of an incident users can now declare an incident as private in Microsoft Teams. Locking it down both in visibility and access pulling in users as and when required, and only when invited.
How private incidents work
Previously, all incidents were run in a Teams Channel, which, while great for communication and organisation across your whole team, could lead to issues if the incident was of a sensitive nature.
Now, when creating a private incident, we instead use private group chats inviting only those granted access. This allows organisations to control access and visibility of an incident to a subset of specific users.
Once invited into the group chat that user becomes authorised to interact and view the incident. They have access to all the same great features available in a public incident, allowing your responders to quickly and easily get on with resolving the problem and not having to worry about what they do or do not say in any discussion.
Enabling private incidents
Private incidents are not enabled by default. In order to turn them on navigate to your security settings and tick the box to enable them.
Once enabled you will be able to add the option to make an incident private into your incident forms.
If you use incident types you can also set it so a certain type is always private. An example use case would be setting all security type incidents to be private to ensure they are handled securely.
Re-authorising your account
If you have previously installed incident.io you may be required to update our bot as well as re-authenticate using an admin account to add additional permissions.
We need additional permissions in order to create and manage the private group-chats. To read more about the permissions we require and what we use them for see our permissions article.
If this is required you will see the following notification when trying to turn on private incidents:
Follow the link to grant new permissions as well as update the version of the bot to the latest.
Once updated you should now be able to enable private incidents! If you face issues with re-authorising or installing the new version please reach out and we will help you get set-up correctly.