Cyber Incident Response Management (CIRM): a new Gartner category for evolving needs

Incident response has been transforming over the past years. What used to be a largely analyst-driven activity, focused on alerts and containment, is now a coordinated effort involving multiple roles, time pressure and long-term accountability.

This shift is increasingly visible at the market level, but it is rooted in very practical concerns.

Poorly handled incidents create risk. As they become more complex, organizations can no longer afford inconsistent incident handling, fragmented communication and incomplete documentation. If left unattended, these gaps can lead not only to inefficient threat management, but also to regulatory penalties, legal costs, overdisclosure and long-term reputational damage.

In 2025, Gartner introduced the term Cybersecurity Incident Response Management (CIRM) to describe a class of tools designed specifically for this new reality.

StrangeBee is honored to be included among representative vendors in this emerging category.

The need for new terminology means that analyst expectations and operational constraints have reached a point where existing tool categories no longer fully fit.

Analysts today are expected to not only investigate but also document decisions as they go, collaborate with people outside the SOC, follow predefined response structures and produce outputs that can be reused weeks or years later.

The tools they rely on need to adapt accordingly:

1. Teams need a centralized, structured incident workspace with guided playbooks that reduce cognitive load without replacing analysts. This workspace should also ensure full traceability of actions, timing and decisions for reporting and future reuse.
2. Collaboration must be intentional and controlled. Access should reflect roles and responsibilities, sensitive discussions should not depend on general-purpose tools, and distributed teams must work with shared language and consistent workflows across regions and functions.
3. Platforms must support preparation as well as response. Teams need to train together through simulations based on real processes, so everyone knows what to do, when to do it and who should be involved under pressure.

These needs exist regardless of organization size or industry. They reflect how the analyst work itself has evolved.

As these expectations converge, the market around incident response tools is starting to reorganize. Solutions that were originally built for automation, ticketing or generic case management are being stretched to cover responsibilities they were not designed for.

Cybersecurity Incident Response Management by Gartner captures a pattern already visible in mature teams: the need for a dedicated system that supports incident response as a process, not just as a technical task.

CIRM solutions center on the incident itself. They provide a system of record, structured response workflows and secure collaboration designed specifically for cybersecurity incidents, rather than adapting tools built for adjacent purposes.

Let’s take TheHive as an example of a Gartner CIRM platform.

Being incident responders ourselves, we built it to reflect these market requirements by design, with investigations evolving over time, requiring shared context and depending on consistent documentation rather than isolated actions or alerts.

We can look at TheHive through the same expectations described above:

1. A dedicated and structured incident workspace: TheHive organizes incident response around cases where alerts, observables, tasks, decisions and reports are connected in one place. Case templates provide structured guidance while analysts remain in control, and every action is recorded with timing and context to support reporting, post-incident analysis and continuous improvement.
2. Controlled collaboration with shared context: Collaboration in TheHive is centered on the incident, with role-based access and clear ownership. TheHive Portal allows legal, management and other stakeholders to participate when needed, while structured workflows and statuses help distributed teams work with a common incident vocabulary across regions and roles.
3. Preparation as part of the response lifecycle: TheHive supports structured exercises and scenario-based workflows built on real playbooks, helping teams align on roles, actions and expectations before a real incident occurs.
   Learn more about how one of our clients conducts incident response training with TheHive.

Whether called CIRM or something else, the underlying shift is already happening. Incident response tools are being shaped by the way analysts actually work today, under operational, legal and organizational constraints.

Cyber Incident Response Management provides one way to describe this evolution. The more important signal is that analyst needs are driving tool design toward systems that emphasize structure, collaboration and accountability.

TheHive aligns with this direction because it was built around those principles from the start: treating the incident as a shared, traceable process, supporting structured collaboration, preparation and reuse rather than isolated actions.

As the market continues to evolve, we stay close to how teams actually work day to day and keep improving the platform to better support real incident response challenges.