
As a CISO or technology leader, your organization’s ability to respond swiftly to incidents is critical.
Most organizations struggle with their incident response tabletop exercises due to:

Unrealistic Scenarios: Exercises that don’t accurately reflect real-world incidents lead to disengagement, reducing their effectiveness.

Ineffective Evaluation: Poorly crafted tabletop exercises fail to properly assess the team’s ability to handle and respond to crises.

Ineffective Evaluation: Poorly crafted tabletop exercises fail to properly assess the team’s ability to handle and respond to crises.
Your Organization Deserves the Best Incident Response Preparation
We have a proven track record of helping companies achieve cybersecurity and crisis leadership excellence through engaging tabletop exercises.
✔ 20+ years of experience
✔ Trusted by Fortune 500 companies
✔ Veteran-owned business
Your Guide to a Tabletop Exercise Experience Like No Other

Custom Scenarios: Realistic cybersecurity exercises tailored to your organization’s specific threats.

Response Validation: Test your incident response playbooks and your team’s ability to act under pressure.

Remediation: Actionable recommendations to close gaps and improve future readiness.
With our Help, Organizations Achieve:
✔ Engaged, Prepared Leadership and Technical Teams: Real-world scenarios that capture attention and drive engagement.
✔ Validated Crisis Planning: Cybersecurity exercises that effectively evaluate your incident response capabilities.
✔ Stronger Leadership: Development of crisis leadership skills that prepare your organization for any scenario.
“PreparedEx pressure tested our response to a simulated outage, and weeks later, that preparation paid off during a real-world global outage.”
– Snr Manager Business Resiliency & Incident Management – Financial Services Company
What to Expect: Your Tabletop Exercise Journey
Our 4-Step Process

Step 1: Engage with Expert Cybersecurity and Crisis Leadership Advisors
Begin your journey toward incident response excellence by engaging with our seasoned experts. We’ll work closely with your team to understand your unique challenges, threats, and organizational needs. This engagement ensures we design a tabletop exercise that accurately reflects your cybersecurity and crisis management goals and aligns with your strategic priorities.

Step 2: Tailored Cybersecurity Scenario Development
In the initial scenario planning meeting, we examine your existing incident response plans, cybersecurity framework, and crisis leadership structure. Our experts collaborate with your team to develop realistic, high-stakes scenarios that simulate potential cybersecurity breaches, data loss, or other technical incidents. This customized scenario challenges your team’s preparedness and response capabilities in real-world conditions.

Step 3: Tabletop Exercise Delivery & Crisis Response Evaluation
Once your tailored scenario is ready, we deliver a dynamic and engaging tabletop exercise. This hands-on simulation tests your incident response team, focusing on critical decision-making, communication, and leadership under pressure. Throughout the exercise, our experts evaluate the effectiveness of your response strategy, crisis leadership, and team dynamics, identifying strengths and areas for improvement.

Step 4: Post-Exercise Report & Remediation Guidance for Enhanced Readiness
After the exercise, we provide a comprehensive post-exercise report with actionable insights and recommendations. Our expert analysis highlights key findings, offering remediation guidance to address gaps in your cybersecurity policies, incident response procedures, and crisis leadership. These tailored recommendations empower your team to enhance readiness and improve response capabilities for future incidents.
CloudStorm: A Tabletop Exercise Case Study
Industry: Financial Services
Overall Engagement: Prepare, Delivery and Evaluate an Executive Leadership and Incident Response Team Tabletop Exercise
Exercise Objectives:
1. Assess and Validate the Effectiveness of Your IT Incident Playbook in Crisis Management and IT Outage Communication
Evaluate the performance and efficiency of your newly developed IT Incident Playbook in coordinating incident response actions and managing crisis communication during IT outages. Ensure that your IT team is equipped to handle disruptions with a clear, actionable response plan.
2. Strengthen and Validate Your Incident Response and Business Continuity Plans for Cloud Service Resilience
Enhance and demonstrate the resilience of your Incident Response and Business Continuity Plans, ensuring they effectively protect critical processes and adequately prepare your organization to handle disruptions in cloud services, ensuring seamless operations during service interruptions.
3. Optimize Data Recovery and Integrity Procedures to Minimize Operational Impact During Service Restorations
Review and refine your data recovery procedures to ensure fast, effective management of data issues following service restorations. Focus on maintaining data integrity while minimizing operational disruptions and downtime, which is essential for business continuity.
4. Refine Communication Protocols for Internal and External Stakeholders During Third-Party Service Disruptions
Evaluate and improve your communication strategies to ensure accurate, timely, and effective messaging both internally and externally during third-party service outages. This helps maintain stakeholder trust and ensures clear, consistent updates during incidents.
The Scenario
A significant cloud infrastructure failure impacts a financial services company’s critical operational applications, including transaction processing, account management, and real-time market data feeds. The incident occurs during peak trading hours, leading to substantial operational disruptions. The company’s IT, crisis management, and communication teams must manage this emergency while balancing internal operations, customer expectations, and regulatory requirements. We evaluated the effectiveness of crisis leadership, timely decision-making, and clear communication throughout the scenario.
The scenario is structured into four key phases: incident response, crisis management, communication challenges, and recovery.
Phase 1: Incident Response and Initial Issues
The primary goal of this phase is to assess the company’s ability to respond quickly and effectively to critical cloud service outage, focusing on technical response, team coordination, and the ability to minimize operational disruption.
Key Events
- At approximately 1:30 PM, the company’s core operational systems powered by cloud infrastructure fail. This includes customer-facing applications like account management and trading platforms and internal systems used for financial reporting, compliance, and risk management.
- The IT team immediately begins troubleshooting, identifying that the cloud provider is experiencing a large-scale infrastructure failure affecting multiple clients, including the organization’s data and transactional systems.
- Service disruptions are escalated to the incident response team, which initiates an emergency meeting. However, the IT team’s initial technical analysis is vague, and there is confusion about whether the outage is local to the company’s infrastructure or a broader regional failure in the cloud provider’s network.
Challenges
- Uncertainty about Root Cause: The crisis management team struggles to make initial decisions due to incomplete technical details and uncertain timelines for resolution.
- Delayed Initial Response: Miscommunication between technical teams and senior leadership slows down the activation of the company’s disaster recovery plan, resulting in a delayed response.
- Lack of Immediate Communication Strategy: Without an established crisis communication plan, messaging to staff and affected customers is delayed. Internal teams are unsure when or how to report updates, leading to frustration and confusion.
Phase 2: Ongoing Crisis Leadership and Decision-Making
This phase tests leadership decision-making under pressure, focusing on how effectively the organization’s executives can navigate the evolving crisis, manage their teams, and make decisions with incomplete information.
Key Events
- As the outage extends beyond 90 minutes, the IR (incident response) management team must make critical decisions, including whether to engage backup systems, communicate externally with customers and investors, and how to manage regulatory reporting requirements.
- While working with the cloud provider, the IT team learned that service restoration could take up to 6 hours. Leadership decides to implement manual workarounds for some critical functions (e.g., paper-based transaction processing) but struggles with resource allocation, as key staff members are still focused on troubleshooting IT infrastructure issues.
- A communication strategy is developed for internal stakeholders, but key executives remain uncertain when to send external messages to customers and the media.
Challenges
- Leadership Coordination: Different departments (IT, communications, operations) struggle to align their strategies and messaging, resulting in delayed decisions that exacerbate the impact of the outage.
- Decision-Making Under Stress: Executives must weigh various factors (e.g., customer impact, compliance risks, resource allocation) but struggle with incomplete situational awareness and conflicting priorities.
- Stakeholder Engagement: The lack of transparent decision-making frustrates stakeholders both internally and externally. Senior leaders struggle to balance transparency with the need to manage reputational risk.
Phase 3: Reputational and Communication Challenges
This phase focuses on the company’s ability to communicate effectively both internally and externally, maintain stakeholder trust, and manage reputational risks throughout the crisis.
Key Events
- As the cloud outage continues, customers cannot access their accounts, place trades, or receive real-time market data. Complaints flood in via customer service channels, social media, and email. Customers express frustration on public forums, while some escalate their grievances to the media.
- The crisis communications team drafts multiple statements for customers, investors, and the media but faces challenges with approval processes, leading to delays in sending out messages.
- Customer comments overwhelm the company’s social media channels, and the crisis communication team struggles to manage the volume of inquiries effectively.
- A financial analyst reports the outage in a live broadcast, raising concerns about the company’s operational resilience. The media attention grows, adding pressure on the communications team to respond quickly.
Challenges
- Internal Communication Breakdown: Employees are uncertain about the status of the outage, causing morale issues and a lack of confidence in leadership. Some employees use social media to voice frustrations, inadvertently exacerbating the public relations issue.
- External Messaging Delay: Without a pre-established crisis communication playbook, the company’s response to customers, investors, and the media is inconsistent and delayed. Lack of transparency compounds customer frustration.
- Social Media Backlash: Customers and stakeholders react negatively to the delay in information and the perceived lack of preparation. Missteps in responding to customer inquiries further damage the company’s public image.
Phase 4: Recovery and Lessons to Be Learned
In this final phase, the company works towards resolving the crisis, restoring full service, addressing operational gaps, and conducting a thorough debrief to improve future preparedness.
Key Events
- After several hours of disruption, the cloud service provider finally restored full functionality to the affected systems. The IT team successfully transitioned back to normal operations, and manual workarounds were phased out.
- The company’s crisis management team began to assess the damage caused by the outage, including financial losses due to transaction delays, customer dissatisfaction, and reputational harm.
- A post-incident review is initiated, with key stakeholders from IT, operations, legal, compliance, and crisis communications departments participating. The review includes an analysis of the organization’s response, crisis communication handling, leadership decisions, and the technical recovery process.
- The company develops a remediation plan to address gaps in the incident response plan, including revising communication protocols, improving real-time technical diagnostics, and implementing more robust cloud service continuity strategies. The remediation plan is implemented by the team.
Challenges
- Rebuilding Stakeholder Trust: Customers affected by the outage remain hesitant to trust the company’s ability to manage future incidents. Efforts to rebuild trust through direct communication and incentives are needed.
- Actionable Insights: The review reveals significant shortcomings in incident detection and communication processes. Recommendations are made to improve internal reporting structures and ensure more apparent, more efficient communication during future incidents.
- Regulatory Pressure: Regulatory bodies require a detailed incident report and assurance that the company implements corrective actions to prevent future disruptions. Legal and compliance teams work together to meet all regulatory requirements while managing reputational risks.
Summary
This scenario highlighted the importance of robust incident response, effective crisis leadership, and transparent communication in managing a significant service disruption. The company’s response to this critical outage underscored its need for pre-established crisis communication plans, improved leadership decision-making protocols, and comprehensive recovery strategies. By learning from this scenario, the company enhanced its resilience and preparedness for future incidents, strengthening its ability to respond effectively to high-stakes crises.
Note: Specific details relating to the Financial Services company were removed or replaced.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the average length of a tabletop exercise?
Answer: The duration of a tabletop exercise depends on the audience. For executive teams, exercises typically last 1 to 2 hours. For Incident Response (IR) teams, exercises can range from 4 to 6 hours, depending on the complexity and objectives of the session.
2. Can you deliver tabletop exercises virtually?
Answer: Yes, we can deliver tabletop exercises virtually, ensuring that remote teams can fully participate in realistic crisis scenarios and engage in effective response training.
3. What kind of scenarios can you create for tabletop exercises?
Answer: We can create any scenarios tailored to your specific risk profile. If you don’t already have a scenario in mind, we will work with you to identify and design scenarios that best align with your organization’s needs and vulnerabilities.
4. What teams should be involved in the tabletop exercise?
Answer: The teams involved will depend on the specific objectives of your exercise. Once your goals are clearly defined, we can help determine the appropriate participants, including any necessary internal teams and external stakeholders such as third-party vendors or support groups.
5. How do I create exercise objectives for my tabletop exercise?
Answer: To create clear and actionable objectives, we recommend using the SMART methodology—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals. This framework helps you outline focused objectives that will guide the structure and outcomes of your tabletop exercise.
6. How long does it take to prepare for a tabletop exercise?
Answer: Preparing for a tabletop exercise typically takes between 6 and 10 weeks, depending on the scale and complexity of the exercise. This time frame allows us to ensure that the scenarios are tailored, participants are properly briefed, and all logistical details are in place.
7. Do you also provide full-time scenario planners?
Answer: Yes, we offer full-time scenario planners as part of our vExPro™ service. These dedicated planners help ensure your exercises are thorough, realistic, and tailored to your organization’s specific needs. Learn more about vExPro HERE.