Tabletop Exercises
The worst time to write your incident response plan is during the incident.
We put your team in the room, run a realistic scenario, and see where the plan holds up and where it doesn’t.
Scenarios built around how you could actually get hit.
Prepare Before the Crisis Hits
A tabletop exercise is a conversational simulation that runs through an organization’s incident response plan, as participants describe their actions during an incident scenario. The purpose of a tabletop exercise isn’t to gauge the effectiveness of existing policies, it’s to bring awareness and highlight potential gaps or flaws within your incident response planning before a real incident occurs.
We recommend that anyone who supervises critical organizational departments or bears responsibility for ensuring business continuity should engage in a tabletop exercise. We recommend conducting them at least once per year to understand where gaps in policy exist and where updates can reduce attack surface and enable your team to act rapidly.
Active participation from all attendees is essential. This is a dynamic learning experience designed to encourage collaboration, surface blind spots, and build confidence across your entire organization.
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Let's Walk Through Your Plan
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How it Works
Secure Ideas develops a simulated incident scenario based on in-depth discussions with your team, then guides participants through the tabletop exercise to uncover gaps and strengthen your incident response plan.
All of my interactions with the Secure Ideas team have been great and the information that they provide has been extremely helpful.
Security Systems Administrator
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Who Should Participate?
Tabletop exercises work best when attendees span multiple departments and leadership levels. We can conduct the exercise with executive stakeholders, non-executive personnel, or both.
Attendees are placed into groups, each representing a different departmental leadership position. Each group evaluates current internal incident response procedures, dissecting your organizational approach when faced with an external threat.
By mixing personnel from security, IT, compliance, legal, and HR, you identify gaps in cybersecurity practices that may not be apparent from conducting the exercise within a single department.
Scoping & Pricing
Tabletop exercises require a discussion to determine the type of scenario you want developed and the number of personnel participating. All of our tabletop services are custom-built to your organization’s needs.
A scoping discussion is usually not required to determine the level of effort for this activity, unless supplemental tasks are being requested.
Key Objectives
Tabletop exercises are designed to achieve specific outcomes that strengthen your organization’s ability to respond to real-world incidents.
These are some of the key benefits:
Critical Thinking
Put the team’s critical thinking and problem-solving skills into practice in a low-risk, controlled environment. Participants brainstorm solutions and practice response plans based on predetermined risks and scenarios, building confidence and familiarity with different strategies for tackling security threats.
Identifying Procedures
Bring your Cyber Incident Response Plan to life, and practice key actions identified in the plan, when there is no active incident to worry about. This lets you better understand your response capability, and develop actionable steps for handling various types of attacks, identifying where updates need to be made.
Teamwork & Decision Making
By bringing together groups from security, IT, compliance, legal, and HR, the teams involved in an incident have an opportunity to have critical conversations. This collaborative approach strengthens communication between teams and provides valuable insight for cross-departmental decision-making.
Assessment of Impact
Gain insights into your teams’ capability to respond swiftly and strategically. Give your processes and procedures a dry run, and make sure every team knows their role. Assess the various risks associated with cyber incidents, and identify potential areas for improvement or additional security measures needed.
Growth & Improvement
Testing emergency plans and protocols in a safe environment allows your team to identify potential risks, and plan preventative measures. A tabletop exercise helps to create accurate response plans for a variety of incident scenarios by identifying areas where your program can mature.
Validating Resources
Running through the plan lets you confirm that the right resources are in place before a real incident occurs, whether those resources are IT Security, Network Engineers, Cybersecurity personnel, or external vendors. Use the exercise to validate that your organization is prepared to respond efficiently to an attack.
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