What is the goal of incident response?

The goal of incident response is to address security incidents effectively and efficiently. This involves a structured approach to managing and mitigating the impact of security breaches or threats. When an incident occurs, the incident response team is dedicated to identifying, investigating, and resolving the issue to restore normal operations while minimizing damage and reducing recovery time. This process includes several stages such as preparation, detection, analysis, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident review, all aimed at ensuring that incidents are handled thoroughly to prevent future occurrences.

In contrast, preventing user access relates more to access control measures rather than incident response itself. Auditing software applications focuses on compliance and performance evaluation rather than responding to incidents. Evaluating employee performance does not directly connect to the goal of managing or responding to security incidents. Each of these options represents different aspects of organizational operations, but only addressing security incidents aligns precisely with the core objectives of incident response.