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.
Bridewell Helps Deliver Competitive Advantage To AlfaPeople
AlfaPeople is a market leading provider of Microsoft Business Solutions, including Microsoft Dynamics. With 14 offices located across Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, AlfaPeople delivers tailored, integrated platforms based on Microsoft Dynamics to its 500 strong customer base to improve customer service, operations and sales. In the UK, AlfaPeople works across a number of sectors, including healthcare, financial services, public sector, manufacturing and professional services.
The Challenge
As a result of working with clients in highly regulated industries, AlfaPeople needed to demonstrate that is has the right compliance and cyber security practices in place. The company embarked on achieving internationally recognised ISO certification, for both quality management (ISO 9001) and information security (ISO 27001). In addition, the company was bidding for a major project where compliance played a major role.
“We’re a rapidly growing expanding business. With the right frameworks in place, we can assure our growing client base that not only do we have the best practices and processes in place for quality management, but that their data is safe with us, which is a key differentiator in today’s climate,” explained Phillip Rawlinson, MD of AlfaPeople UK.
“Achieving ISO 9001 also means that we have the right foundation to scale up more quickly and be more agile in our approach.”
However, in preparation of the audit and accreditation process, the company identified a lack of in-house resource to dedicate to the task. Bridewell was brought in to assist with the certification and implementation of the frameworks.
The Solution
Bridewell is a specialist cyber security and data privacy consultancy that delivers a range of solutions, including support, management and audit services around achieving ISO accreditation.
The Bridewell team worked with AlfaPeople to understand what was required, what processes were already in place, and what needed to be implemented from a framework point of view.
Based on the demands of the project and looking at the longer-term benefits of implementing a standards framework, Bridewell recommended a business management system to deal with the control of all the associated documentation. The system would also act as a resource for employees and auditors to source the evidence and documentation needed as part of the initial audit, as well as future audits.
Since implementing the business management system, AlfaPeople has been able to centralise its processes, policies and procedures. This includes standard templates for contracts and working with third parties, as well as procedures on employee behaviour and adherence to security policies.
“It’s a great point of reference for our employees and a fantastic resource for the ISO qualifications, but it also helps us with the way we work with our customers and suppliers. It’s helped us win new business and contracting for that business, because we can prove we have the infrastructure in place,” said Rawlinson.
The Results
Bridewell prides itself on a 100% first-time success rate when it comes to helping customers become ISO accredited. In the case of AlfaPeople, this also proved to be true. The company achieved its certification for both standards first-time round, and in a lot less time than its other offices.
“Bridewell was extremely knowledgeable and efficient. They looked at what we had in place and then made recommendations on where we needed to improve, what documentation was needed to support that, and what additional training we needed. The team worked with us right from scoping out the requirements to preparing us for the external audit with the auditors.”
“The project went according to plan, in terms of budget and deadline, and achieving the accreditation has enabled us to win new customers and is a key differentiator for us, especially ISO 27001. I would recommend the Bridewell team, based on their professionalism, expertise and high quality of service delivery,” concluded Rawlinson.
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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.
