Incident Response Preparation

Find out now, not at 2am on a long weekend.

Real incidents are messy. Your exercise should be too.

When it actually happens, two systems report conflicting statuses. Your incident commander is on a plane. Someone asks whether legal has to notify, and whether the clock started an hour ago or yesterday.

That ambiguity is exactly what we rehearse. You walk out knowing your team can make good calls with incomplete information, because they've already done it once.

What makes an exercise worth running

  • It's built from your world. I start with your architecture, your risk register, your past incidents, and the threats genuinely landing in your sector. Everyone in the room recognises the scenario immediately, so everyone engages with it properly.

  • The right people are in the room. IT and security, yes, and legal, comms, finance, executive leadership, and where it matters, your insurer and key third parties. Real incidents test the handoffs: cloud team to SOC, a vendor as the entry point, the acquisition still being integrated. Rehearsing those connections is where the value lives.

  • Your decisions shape what happens next. No predetermined path. The scenario responds to the calls your team actually makes, so you're testing real decision-making under pressure, not a mental recall of a document.

  • It gets uncomfortable. A good exercise leaves people mildly arguing about who owned what. If everyone walks out feeling reassured, you paid for reassurance, not readiness.

What you get afterwards

A report with specific findings tied to specific moments: the escalation path to tighten when your incident commander is unreachable, the notification clock to get crisp on, the runbook referencing a system you decommissioned last year. Every finding comes with an owner and a date, so improvement starts the same week.

Formats

  • Executive tabletop — Board and leadership, focused on decision rights, disclosure, and the calls only executives can make.

  • Technical tabletop — Security and engineering, focused on detection, containment, forensics and recovery sequencing.

  • Combined multi-stage — The escalation from technical team to executive leadership, and the handover that makes or breaks a response.

  • Progression across a year — Increasing difficulty, varied threats, with decision timing tracked exercise to exercise. A single exercise shows you where you stood on a Tuesday. A series shows you getting measurably faster.

Offerings

Incident Response Simulation - Technical Tabletop

Detection through to recovery, with your responders.

Your security and engineering teams work a realistic incident from first alert to restoration. Detection, triage, containment decisions, forensic preservation, and the recovery sequencing that determines whether you're down for a day or a fortnight.

Scenarios are built from your architecture, your logging, and the threats genuinely landing in your sector. If someone in the room can say "that couldn't happen here," the exercise has already failed.

You get: a custom scenario, facilitated session with live injects that respond to your team's decisions, and an after-action report with named owners and dates

Incident Response Simulation - Executive Tabletop

The decisions only your leadership can make.

Disclosure. Regulator notification. Whether to pay. When to tell customers. Who speaks to media. These calls get made under pressure, with incomplete information, usually within hours, and they're almost never rehearsed.

Your board and executive team work through a scenario built from your actual business and your actual obligations. You'll find out whether decision rights are clear, whether anyone knows the notification clock, and whether your insurer's requirements are understood by the people who'll need to meet them.

You get: a custom scenario tied to your environment, facilitated session, and an after-action report with specific findings, named owners and dates.

Incident Response Simulation - Combined Multi Stage

Technical escalating to executive. The handover that makes or breaks a response.

Most organisations rehearse their technical team and their leadership separately, then discover during a real incident that the two don't connect. Information arrives late, or garbled, or with the wrong emphasis, and executives make decisions on a picture that's already hours old.

This format runs the incident across both groups, in sequence. Your responders work the technical problem, then have to brief leadership under pressure, and leadership has to make calls on what they're actually given, not on a clean summary prepared in advance.

You get: a multi-stage scenario spanning both audiences, facilitated across both sessions, and a combined after-action report examining the escalation itself.

Incident Response Simulation - Annual Program

Three exercises across a year. Proof that you're getting better.

A single exercise tells you where you stood on one Tuesday. A program tells you whether you're improving, and the improvement is what your board, your insurer and your regulator actually want evidence of.

Three exercises across twelve months, increasing in difficulty and varying the threat, with decision timing measured consistently so you can see response times moving. Each exercise builds on findings from the last, so you're testing the fixes, not repeating the same discoveries.

You get: three custom exercises across the year, mixed formats to suit your audiences, tracked metrics exercise to exercise, a year-end report suitable for board and insurer, and retests built into the program.

Works out at roughly 15% below booking the same three exercises individually.

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