What is the Difference between a Security Event, an Alert, and an Incident?

A security event refers to the security-impacting activity that occurred. Alerts are the notifications — often found in logs or derived from analysis and a correlation of logs —  a system sends to inform IT and IS teams of the event. Incidents are high-impact security events that have a significant negative impact on a business as a whole and require significant effort to identify, mitigate and remediate. An event may be irregular and/or minor but does not seriously impact a business, or an event could be highly disruptive and possibly cause a loss of revenue, making it an incident.