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.
Buzzacott Enhance Governance, Clarity and Confidence in Data Protection with Bridewell
Buzzacott is a leading accountancy and advisory firm which helps businesses, individuals, and non-profits make confident decisions. With over a century of service and more than 600 team members, the firm operates out of a London office and maintains a presence in Hong Kong and Dubai.
Given the scale of its business, Buzzacott had reached a point where its data protection processes were working well but becoming increasingly complex. As the firm’s reach broadened and its services diversified, maintaining efficiency, consistency, and compliance depended on enhancing its overall data protection maturity.
This included strengthening governance structures, improving visibility over processing activities, and ensuring its teams have clearer guidance and confidence in applying data protection principles day‑to‑day.
The Challenge
As part of its efforts to mature its overall approach to data protection, Buzzacott sought to:
- Build a more mature and future‑proof data protection framework, ensuring documentation, processes and decision‑making structures could scale with the organisation.
- Develop a clear and complete view of processing activities, supporting accountability, and providing a strong foundation for ongoing enhancement.
- Embed privacy by design and default, ensuring operational teams have practical tools, templates and support when designing or updating processes.
- Support international growth by increasing clarity on cross‑border requirements and ensuring global operations aligned with regulatory expectations.
To achieve this, Buzzacott considered a range of options, from refining internal processes using existing materials to adopting third‑party frameworks or tools. Ultimately, the firm decided to seek out a partner that could offer both structure and practical, hands‑on support. This would provide Buzzacott with specialist expertise while also building its internal capability for the long term.
The Solution
Bridewell was selected because of its ability to provide an integrated and comprehensive approach – combining policy development, documentation, operational tooling, resourcing support, and tailored training. The team brought expertise across governance, risk, privacy engineering, and international regulatory frameworks, enabling Buzzacott to uplift maturity across multiple areas at once.
A key value add was Bridewell’s deep understanding of Buzzacott through its long-standing partnership as its outsourced SOC provider.
The Results
Since working together, Buzzacott has seen a significant uplift in the maturity, clarity, and consistency of its data protection programme. Key benefits include:
- A more complete and reliable overview of processing activities, strengthening compliance, and decision‑making.
- A well‑structured improvement roadmap with clear ownership, sequencing, and visibility of progress.
- Greater confidence across teams, with accessible guidance and clearer procedures tailored to Buzzacott’s context.
- Stronger international readiness, supporting expansion and cross‑border operations.
- Improved operational efficiency, with privacy considerations more naturally integrated into existing processes, reducing the burden on teams.
- Faster, more consistent responses to internal and external data protection enquiries and requirements.
While formal KPIs continue to evolve, the overarching benefit has been a measurable increase in structure, confidence, and repeatability across Buzzacott’s data protection activities.
A leading accountancy and advisory firm which helps businesses, individuals, and non-profits make confident decisions.
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.
