Cyber Incident Exercising
Our cyber incident exercising service helps develop your organisation’s muscle memory in response to potential threats in realistic threat scenarios.
What is a Cyber Incident Exercising?
Cyber incident exercising is the process of practising cyber response techniques against potential threats in a safe and simulated environment.
The purpose of cyber incident exercising is to prepare cyber security teams for real threat scenarios, where response time is critical.
Its tactics and techniques can be used to establish current organisational practices and formulate an incident response plan (IRP) - or to evaluate the effectiveness of an existing IRP.
The Importance of Cyber Incident Exercising
Our cyber incident exercise service is recommended for any organisation looking to upskill and optimise their cyber security team’s ability and preparedness to handle the latest threats.
In the unfortunate event of a breach, well-practised teams can communicate, respond and remediate the threat effectively to minimise the impact. Several key benefits include:
- Cross-team Coordination: Bridewell’s cyber incident exercising service incorporates multiple departments, from IT to legal and communications. During incident response situations, your teams will gain necessary insight into each role and work collaboratively.
- Realistic Scenarios: Roleplaying scenarios suggested by our cyber incident exercising team are based on threats your organisation faces, updated with current industry trends. This is done to provide a realistic environment in which to pressure test your team.
- Identify Gaps in Security: With Bridewell’s cyber incident exercising service, you’ll be able to review team performance in simulations, so you can spot and amend any gaps in team coordination.
What to Expect from Cyber Incident Exercising with Bridewell
Our cyber incident exercising service is designed to prepare your organisation for an effective response against cyber attacks.
It replicates the realistic scenarios your organisation might face. So, key staff know their roles and responsibilities when a live incident occurs. This means less time speculating and more time responding in the face of a real attack.
The key components of our cyber incident exercising service include:
Realistic Simulations
Cyber incident exercising offers tailored simulations that imitate a real cyber attack. This is based on risks, vulnerabilities, and industry threats, to make the simulation highly relevant to a specific organisation. These attacks can range from ransomware to data breaches or insider threats. The aim is to challenge your organisation’s response capabilities and pressure test your team to identify gaps in your remediation process.
Team Involvement
Bridewell’s cyber incident exercising service incorporates members from various departments, including IT, security, communications and legal. This helps ensure that everyone within your organisation is coordinated in its approach to cyber threats.
Cyber Live Play Exercises
Bridewell’s Live Play exercises emulate an adversary incident as a trigger event - adding realism that goes beyond the boardroom table. Technical Live Play is based on your organisation’s threat landscape and uses MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques to develop incident escalation. Executive Live Play focuses on senior decision-making, leadership response and communication in the event of a live attack.
Tactical Guidance
Bridewell’s cyber security experts provide tactical guidance in real-time, offering advice and helping teams understand best practices and improve response strategies.
Debrief and Improvement Plans
Our team of experts will provide a debrief and feedback post-simulation to help break down gaps in team performance and provide actionable plans for improvements going forward.
Learn more about our Incident Response Services
If you require a cyber incident exercising service, speak with one of our team to see how we can support.
Azets UK Achieve ISO 27001:2022 Certification with Support from Bridewell
Azets UK is a specialist accounting and business advisory firm providing locally delivered audit, payroll, corporate finance, tax and business advisory services from more than 70 offices across the UK. To demonstrate their commitment to information security to their current and potential future clients, Azets UK were looking for a cyber security partner to help them achieve ISO 27001 certification.
The Challenge
Across their wide office network in the UK, Azets UK has over 3,800 employees delivering everything from accounting to tax, audit, advisory and business services to over 80,000 clients and as part of the larger international Azets business works with colleagues in the Nordics and Europe.
Given the scale of their business, meeting all the specific controls outlined in ISO 27001 was no small task. Specifically, ISO 27001 demands complex documentation that can be difficult to produce with limited resources and time. Azets UK were also looking to engage a wider range of their senior stakeholders with their ISMS.
The Solution
To start Azets UK on their journey to certification, we first delivered an ISO 27001 gap analysis to identify any areas that would require improvement to pass an audit. This analysis was based on a series of detailed workshops conducted by our consultants with Azets UK key stakeholders, including their CEO, CTO, Director of Security, HR, and Procurement.
Through these workshops, we identified that while Azets UK was already mature in its approach to information security, they would need to make some changes to meet specific ISO controls. Additionally, many of their policies and procedures, while aligned with best practice, weren’t formalised and would benefit from formal documentation.
These findings were shared with Azets UK in a report, which led directly into a 12-month project where our consultants supported Azets UK in implementing the recommendations outlined in the report.
This implementation project consisted of:
- Incorporating Azets risk management framework into the ISO 27001 risk register
- Performing risk assessment workshops
- Drafting new policies, procedures and standards
- Supporting with the design and implementation of new and improved information security and data protection controls.
To assess how the project was going, we also developed KPIs to monitor and measure security performance throughout the duration of the project. This was further supported by the establishment of an Information Security Leadership Board (ISLB), which held monthly meetings to review how the project was progressing, keep stakeholders up to speed on the project, and clearly define their roles and responsibilities.
“Throughout the project, Bridewell were easy to work with and managed the project effectively. In particular, we benefitted from the weekly meetings they held with our control owners to review progress against our KPIs and assign tasks to ensure we kept on track to meet ISO 27001 standards by our deadline.”
The Results
Having implemented all the recommendations from the original gap analysis, Azets UK then undertook their ISO 27001 audit. The audit came back with no findings, which was a great result and a testament to the increased maturity of Azets’ ISMS.
“We had no findings in our ISO 27001 audit. They made the certification process straightforward, identifying areas where additional work was needed for the control objectives and what we needed to do to get there. The roadmap they provided, alongside their ways of working, provided a clear structure to the project and made it very manageable.”
In the future, as their ISMS continues to mature, we have already outlined a number of actions Azets UK can take to maintain their certification.
Industry
Cyber Incident Exercising FAQs
Incident response exercising should be conducted regularly, for example annually or biannually, depending on your risk profile and requirements. It should also be undertaken when significant updates or changes are made to your cyber security infrastructure. This could be through new staff, systems or identified threats.
Tabletop exercising and live play are both cyber incident tactics designed to assess and develop an organisation’s cyber readiness. But they differ in their approach.
A tabletop exercise, as its name suggests, is based in the boardroom. It involves walking teams through potential scenarios and helping them understand their roles and responsibilities as incidents escalate. This can be valuable in building confidence and understanding in a workshop environment.
Live play goes one step further by simulating a real attack to trigger a cyber incident. The main benefit of live play is the ability to pressure-test individuals in a realistic attack scenario.
Live play and red teaming are both cyber security tactics used to test a team’s ability to effectively respond to threats.
Red teaming aims to test an organisation’s ability to detect and manage attacks by simulating an attempt to hack or compromise the IT environment. It aims to evaluate threat prevention and spot gaps in defences.
Live play is instead focused on testing the organisation’s response once an incident has already occurred. It focuses on response effectiveness – how teams communicate and ultimately remediate a live, escalating incident.
Why Us?
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Awards
Our team have won numerous industry awards, including 'Cyber Security Company of the Year' at the Cyber Security Awards 2026 and Best Cyber Security Service Provider' at the Cyber Security Awards 2025.
Certifications
Our people and services are highly accredited by leading industry bodies including CREST, the NCSC, and more. Our SOC holds extensive accreditations from CREST (including for CSIR and SOC2) and works closely with our cyber consultancy services.
Partnerships
As a Microsoft Partner, we also hold advanced specialisms in Cloud Security and Threat Protection. We’ve also implemented some of the UK’s largest deployments of the Microsoft Security stack, inc. Sentinel, Defender, Purview and more.
