Tabletop exercise

Prepare your team for real-world incidents with our tabletop exercise service.

What’s the purpose of a tabletop exercise?

A tabletop exercise is essential for assessing and improving your organisation’s incident response capabilities. It enables your team to discuss, simulate, and analyse how they would react in a real-world security breach, disaster, or any other emergency. By walking through various hypothetical scenarios, your team can identify process gaps, enhance communication, and improve department coordination.

This proactive approach helps strengthen your security posture, enhance decision-making during a crisis, and ensure that response plans are comprehensive and actionable.

Senior cyber security consultant conducting a tabletop exercise, discussing incident response strategies with team members.

Scoping and planning

Define objectives

We work closely with your team to establish the key goals of the tabletop exercise. Whether focusing on a ransomware attack, insider threat, or business continuity during a cyber incident, we tailor the exercise to address your primary concerns and prepare for realistic threats.

Requirements

We gather relevant information about your network, existing security procedures, and incident response plans to set up the exercise. We aim to simulate realistic and impactful scenarios based on your organisational environment and critical assets.

Custom scenario design

Each tabletop exercise is tailored to your industry and specific organisational needs. We create realistic scenarios based on current threat landscapes, considering your network architecture, attack surface, and existing security protocols.

Methodology

Scenario simulation

We design and run simulations that mimic real-world cyber incidents, allowing your team to explore how they would respond. These scenarios include threats such as data breaches, ransomware attacks, or insider attacks, testing your response strategies in a controlled environment.

Interactive group discussion

Our facilitator leads an interactive discussion with key stakeholders, focusing on decision-making, role allocation, and procedural review. These discussions help identify weaknesses, communication issues, and opportunities to strengthen your team’s readiness.

Post-exercise evaluation

After the exercise, we thoroughly evaluate your team’s performance, highlighting strengths and areas for improvement. This process allows for a deeper understanding of response efficiency, highlighting the need for better coordination, policy adjustments, or tool optimisations.

source code review

Why choose Cognisys’ tabletop exercise?

Choose our tabletop exercise service to boost your team’s preparedness for cyber incidents.

Our certified experts design tailored scenarios that reflect your organisation’s real-world risks. Through structured simulations and group analysis, we provide actionable insights and detailed feedback, enabling you to refine your incident response strategies.

With comprehensive post-exercise reports and recommendations, we help you build a resilient incident response framework, improving communication, coordination, and crisis management.

FAQs

A typical exercise lasts 3 to 5 hours, depending on the complexity of the scenario and your team’s size. Multi-day exercises may be conducted for more in-depth assessments.

Preparation involves gathering existing incident response plans, defining key personnel roles, and ensuring relevant stakeholders are available for the exercise. We provide guidance on what materials and information are needed in advance.

Tabletop exercises are designed to be non-disruptive. They are conducted in a controlled, discussion-based environment, allowing your team to review their response strategies without affecting day-to-day operations.

Scenarios are customised to your organisation’s needs and can cover incidents like ransomware attacks, data breaches, business continuity issues, or insider threats. Each exercise is tailored to align with your industry-specific challenges.

After the exercise, we provide a comprehensive report detailing your team’s performance, identifying gaps, and offering recommendations for improving your incident response procedures. This enables you to fine-tune your processes and enhance your readiness for future incidents.

Let’s make things happen

Fill in the form and one of our team will be in touch for a no-obligation discussion or quote regarding your requirements.

info@cognisys.co.uk
Leeds office

5 Park Place
Leeds
LS1 2RU

info@cognisys.co.uk
London office

131 Finsbury Pavement
London
EC2A 1NT

LET’S TALK

Discover how we’ve helped leading organisations

RECENT UPDATES

In Parallel achieves ISO 42001 at breakneck speed

CASE STUDY

In Parallel achieves ISO 42001 at breakneck speed

Learn how we helped In Parallel achieve their ISO 42001 certification, boosting their market credibility.

The biggest cyber attacks and vulnerabilities from September 2024

NEWS

The biggest cyber attacks and vulnerabilities from September 2024

Insights and trends from recent cyber threats and vulnerabilities from September.

IT manager using SmartScan to prioritise vulnerabilities, organising tasks based on severity to enhance security efforts.

BLOG

What is vulnerability management?

In this blog, we discuss what vulnerability management is, the lifecycle from discovering weaknesses to prioritising, resolving, and continuously improving defences to minimise cyber risks.