The Rising Complexity of Incident Response: Exploring Key Incident Response Trends at the SANS IR Command Roundtable

Incident response has entered a new era marked by complexity. Breaches now unfold faster, spread further, and impact everything from identity systems and cloud services to endpoints, hardware, and industrial networks. The stakes are higher, and attackers are learning how to look “normal” in your environment. To make matters trickier, AI can be coaxed into training attackers on how to penetrate your environment, how to behave, and how to remain undetected. The question isn’t whether an incident will happen or not, but how prepared teams are when it does. In 2026, SANS is sharpening its focus on helping organizations understand and strengthen that readiness.

Across the community, responders are feeling the pressure of incidents that demand immediate clarity. Teams hesitate in the first moments because signals are noisy. Analysts miss subtle indicators because they’re buried inside hybrid environments where evidence lands out of sequence. And when incidents touch IT, cloud, and OT simultaneously, coordination becomes the defining challenge. Those dynamics — speed, ambiguity, and cross-environment complexity — shape nearly every major response effort today.

Responders report uncertainty under pressure. Analysts struggle to distinguish meaningful signals from background noise. They often head down the infamous “rabbit hole” and spend too much time there. Organizations see investigations drift when teams lose a shared sense of what they’re trying to prove. And leadership finds it difficult to maintain situational awareness when escalation paths aren’t clear. These systemic friction points represent the real-world constraints response teams must work through in the first minutes of an intrusion.

Why the First Minutes Matter

Most investigations don’t go off track hours into an incident; they go off track within the first phase of triage. Hesitation, over-collection, or premature scoping can set an investigation on the wrong trajectory. As environments become more interconnected, that cost compounds. A single misread identity signal in a cloud repository, a misinterpreted endpoint artifact, or a gap in OT visibility can ripple into hours, days or even weeks of correction later.

Teams also face coordination challenges that didn’t exist a decade ago. SOC analysts, IR leads, cloud teams, and OT defenders often confront the same incident from different vantage points. Without alignment, critical insights sit in silos and collection efforts are duplicated. That fragmentation delays containment and blurs decision-making—allowing the adversary to dwell and spread through the environment. These patterns are consistent across sectors: finance, healthcare, SaaS, critical infrastructure, manufacturing, and the public sector.

This is the environment responders must operate in today. Not linear. Not compartmentalized. High-pressure, cross-domain, remotely, and shaped by incomplete information.

The Coordination Challenge Every Organization Feels

Even mature programs struggle when an intrusion touches multiple layers of the organization at once. Technical teams may be responding to evidence gaps or logging abnormalities, while leadership is trying to understand business impact and regulatory obligations. If escalation pathways aren’t clear, decision-making slows down. If communication channels aren’t structured, efforts are lost or repeated. And without shared visibility across IT, cloud, and OT, scoping becomes guesswork.

These issues magnify the operational burden of incident response. They lead to slower containment, inconsistent actions, and internal uncertainty about what the incident actually means. In many cases, the technical challenge isn’t the hardest part; coordination is. Creating a unified response process across teams and roles is what turns crisis into control. This is why IR will be a major area of emphasis for SANS in 2026. The industry needs clearer patterns, stronger cross-team cohesion, and practical guidance for navigating incidents that no longer resemble single-domain problems.

Introducing the SANS IR Command Roundtable

To open this year’s focus, we’re bringing together a group of leaders who have lived through the types of incidents shaping today’s landscape. On March 5, we will host the SANS IR Command Roundtable, a virtual conversation that brings CISOs and frontline responders into the same discussion. This session will examine the realities teams encounter behind the scenes:

• How response breaks down when tooling is fragmented or escalation is unclear
• Where cross-functional workflows lose momentum under pressure
• How hybrid incidents challenge assumptions across IT, SOC, cloud, and OT
• What early triage patterns actually help prevent escalation
• The new response challenges emerging as we look toward 2026 and beyond

This discussion will center on practical lessons from field experience, like what works, what reliably falls apart, and how organizations can create conditions that support faster, more coordinated decision-making. Our intent is to surface the patterns that define modern response and give teams a clearer sense of where to focus their readiness efforts.

Incident response is now defined by complexity and speed. The organizations that respond effectively aren’t the ones with the most tools; they’re the ones whose teams share a clear operating picture, make disciplined early decisions, and stay aligned as an incident evolves. The SANS IR Command Roundtable will explore those themes directly. Join us for a grounded, candid discussion on how leading teams execute when it matters most.