Which process is primarily responsible for restoring normal operations after an incident?

Incident management is primarily responsible for restoring normal operations after an incident. This process focuses on minimizing the impact of unexpected disruptions to services and ensuring that normal service operations are resumed as quickly as possible. Incident management deals with the identification, logging, categorization, prioritization, investigation, diagnosis, resolution, and recovery of incidents that affect IT services.

The main goal of incident management is to restore service to users swiftly, which directly aligns with the requirement to bring operations back to normal following an incident. This ensures that service levels are maintained and helps organizations regain productivity as soon as possible after disruptions. Moreover, incident management serves as a critical process within the broader IT service management framework, allowing for effective communication and coordination during and after incidents occur.

In contrast, problem management focuses on handling the root causes of incidents to prevent them from recurring, change control manages modifications to the IT environment to ensure minimal disruption, and configuration management deals with maintaining information about the configuration items (CIs) within the IT infrastructure. Each of these processes supports overall service management but does not specifically concentrate on the immediate restoration of service like incident management does.