Practice 05 · Services
Incident Preparedness and Crisis Readiness
An incident response plan that has never been tested will fail when it matters. We test yours before an attacker does, surfacing the gaps that only appear under pressure.
The problem we solve
Incident response plans are written for incidents that do not happen
Most incident response plans are written in calm conditions, approved by a committee, and stored in a location nobody remembers when a real incident occurs. They describe an orderly process that assumes the right people are available, the right systems are working, and the situation is the one the plan anticipated. None of these assumptions survive contact with an actual breach.
Real incidents reveal three categories of failure. The first is decision authority gaps: nobody is certain who has the authority to take the organization offline, notify regulators, or communicate externally. The second is communication breakdown: teams that have never practiced incident communication under pressure produce contradictory messages that compound the reputational damage. The third is escalation failure: the right people are not involved at the right moment because the escalation criteria were never tested against a realistic scenario.
What this practice covers
Scope of engagement
Tabletop exercises
Structured scenario exercises that put your leadership and security team through realistic incident conditions, revealing the decision gaps and communication failures that a real event would expose.
Playbook review and rebuild
Evaluating your existing response playbooks against your actual threat scenarios and rebuilding the ones that would not hold in a real incident.
Crisis communication planning
Designing the communication framework for board, regulator, customer, and media notification so your team is not making these decisions under time pressure during a live incident.
Decision authority mapping
Establishing clear, pre-agreed authority for the decisions that cannot wait for a committee meeting when a breach is in progress.
Readiness scoring
A structured assessment of your organization’s current incident readiness across detection, containment, communication, and recovery capabilities.
Regulatory notification planning
Mapping the notification obligations under your applicable regulatory frameworks and building the process for meeting them within required timeframes.
How an engagement works
Three phases to genuine crisis readiness
Phase 01
Readiness assessment and playbook review
We review your existing incident response plans, playbooks, and communication frameworks against your actual threat scenarios. We identify the gaps before we design exercises to test them.
Phase 02
Tabletop exercise design and facilitation
We design realistic scenarios based on your specific threat model and facilitate the exercise with your leadership and security team. We observe decision-making, communication patterns, and escalation behavior in real time.
Phase 03
Findings, remediation, and updated playbooks
We debrief with the team, document every gap the exercise exposed, and produce updated playbooks and decision frameworks that address them. We also provide a readiness score your leadership can track over time.
Begin with a conversation.
Tell us about your current incident response program and what scenarios concern you most. We will respond within one business day.
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