Security Incident Handling in High Availability Environments

The telephony industry has, over time, developed very mature incident handling procedures, due in no small part to the need to manage contractual expectations and obligations on the part of both suppliers and operators. But as this industry was uniquely focused on maintaining contractually-promised Five Nines service levels, their ability to respect modern-day security-related expectations in their incident handling processes may not be possible without making some significant and much needed adaptations. This paper will describe an incident handling process for high-availability systems, compare it to a popular security incident handling model, and propose to the telephony industry ways of sufficiently addressing confidentiality and integrity considerations, all while respecting their business need of maintaining high levels of service availability.