Described herein are systems, methods, and software to improve incident response in an information technology (IT) environment. In one example, an incident service executes a course of action with one or more actions to respond to an incident in the IT environment. During execution, the incident service identifies a request to obtain data from an external service outside of the IT environment and determines whether the data is cached in a data store for the IT environment. If cached, the incident service obtains the data for the action from the data store. In contrast, if the data is not cached, the incident service obtains the data for the action from the external service.