Why major incident management has become the new ‘public safety’ for digital business

Major incidents were once considered an IT problem, but today that view no longer holds. Now both businesses and customers alike feel the rippling impact of these outages. They resemble public safety issues in the digital sense, because the reliability of online systems now underpins the stability of everyday life. life.

A quick timeline on incident management

In the early 2000s major incident activity was treated as a discipline in its own right, long before such thinking became common in other organisations. Early service management tools supported the process, working within the technical limitations of the era but much of the coordination still relied on manual effort, tribal knowledge, and fragmented systems that made speed and structure difficult.

Two decades later, the environment has transformed. Digital infrastructures have grown larger, more interconnected, and far more fragile. A single outage can affect millions of customers, disrupt global supply chains, and even move financial markets. The recent Azure and AWS outages are clear examples of how the failure of cloud services can create immediate and widespread impact that is often outside the control of any one organisation.

Although businesses have poured significant investment into preventing outages, far fewer have invested in the leadership, structure, and coordination required when prevention fails. This gap has created a new kind of risk, one born not only of technical failure but of the inability to respond cohesively when digital services are compromised. This is why major incident management has quietly undergone a profound transformation.

Historically, major incident practices sat deep within IT operations. The focus was on hardware failures, server crashes, and application defects, and technology teams owned the process from start to finish. Today, major incidents behave more like public emergencies. They escalate quickly, often unpredictably, and require decisive leadership. Their consequences extend far beyond an internal technical function. Executives, regulators, media organisations, and customers can become stakeholders within minutes. A single disruption can cascade through global supply chains, upstream and downstream integrations, and partner ecosystems, creating an economy-wide ripple effect. As a result, major incident management has expanded into a business-wide discipline that requires clear understanding of business and customer impact, real-time

visibility into service and application health, rapid mobilisation of technical and business teams, coordinated recovery, and transparent communication to all relevant stakeholders. This expanding scope has forced organisations to replace ad-hoc processes with principles drawn from crisis leadership, where clarity of information, calm under pressure, and unified command structures are essential.

Where the responsibility lies when an incident occurs

Within this shift, CIOs, CTOs, and Heads of Operations are increasingly expected to act less like traditional technology leaders and more like crisis operators. Major incidents demand authority in the moment, structured communication, rapid decision-making, and the ability to coordinate diverse teams across both technical and business domains. They also require a full appreciation of organisational and regulatory impact. This is no longer a back-office operational activity. Executives join bridges, board’s request immediate updates, customers expect transparency, and regulators demand consistency. Major incidents have become real-time, enterprise-wide events, and the pressure on leaders has intensified accordingly. Without strong frameworks and the right tooling, even the most experienced incident commanders can be forced to improvise under intense scrutiny.

Modern solutions paving the way for transparency

Luckily there’s a lifeline, with new modern solutions that are bringing every aspect of incident response into a single pane of glass, enabling incident leaders to mobilise technical and business teams within minutes rather than tens of minutes, collaborate instantly through integrated chat and video conferencing, see service and application health in real time, understand business and customer impact through a comprehensive configuration model, coordinate recovery actions with structured workflows, and send precise, targeted updates to stakeholders at pace. They also allow incident managers to track milestones from detection to closure while maintaining complete transparency across the organisation. Many of the tasks that once consumed valuable time, such as assembling teams, running health checks, and distributing updates, can now be automated, which frees leaders to focus on strategy and decision-making. This has transformed major incident response from a reactive, IT-driven process into a proactive command and control capability at the heart of digital resilience.

This evolution matters because organisations now expect major incident management to achieve several essential outcomes. They expect faster recovery times, driven by rapid mobilisation, automation, and coordinated action. They expect full transparency across the enterprise so that executives, business functions, and regulators have clarity rather than confusion. They also expect a continuous understanding of the health of the environment, since modern infrastructures require real-time insight into both technical and business impact. These capabilities now define operational resilience, protecting

revenue, customer trust, and brand reputation, all of which can be damaged within minutes during an outage.

The most forward-thinking organisations are extending major incident tools and practices into business continuity and resilience. The recovery plans, business impact models, team structures, and communication patterns used during a major incident naturally form the foundation for disaster recovery testing, resilience planning, business continuity exercises, scenario modelling, and executive simulations. Major incident management is no longer an isolated operational function; it is becoming the central nervous system of organisational resilience.

Looking ahead

In our always-on economy, major incidents have started to behave like public emergencies. They require structure, leadership, coordination, and a discipline that goes well beyond traditional IT operations. The modern major incident leader must be able to command a real-time, enterprise-wide response with confidence and clarity, and modern organisations must provide them with the tools to achieve this. Major incident management has evolved from a specialist IT process into a core element of digital trust and resilience, and we are only beginning to see how far this discipline will continue to develop.