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.
HESA Drive Digital Transformation with Bridewell’s DPO as a Service
The Challenge
As a leading HE data source and one of the largest processors of data in the UK, HESA handles ‘special category’ (highly sensitive) data for over 30 million people across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. To ensure that this data was handled securely and in compliance with all relevant regulations, HESA needed a highly qualified and driven DPO with the skills to both manage their data privacy function and support a major transformation project. For HESA, data is a core part of every aspect of their business and ensuring the right practices are in place is essential to their operations.
The challenge for HESA was finding a suitably qualified DPO to occupy the role at an appropriate cost and within a reasonable timeframe. As with many cyber security roles, data privacy experts are in high demand and there were few candidates with the right expertise and experience to match HESA’s requirements.
"We didn’t just want our DPO to come into HESA to run the data privacy team and maintain business as usual. We needed someone who could add strategic value to our processes and the major projects that are key to our current operations and future ambitions."
Given the size and scope of their organisation, data protection teams and architecture, HESA recognised the importance of finding the right person for the role and concluded that using a service provider to find a suitable DPO was a good option. Rather than undergoing a timely and expensive recruitment process, outsourcing to Bridewell assured them of a highly certified data privacy expert to lead their data protection team.
The Solution
In parallel to seeking a DPO, HESA were already engaged with Bridewell in an implementation project. Given the success of the infosec project and their strong relationship with the Bridewell consultant running it, HESA decided to bring them into the business as their named DPO.
"Bridewell was our first choice for a DPO. I had only been working with [our Bridewell consultant] for a few weeks but, given the quality of their work, it was clear that the standard they provided matched if not exceeded our requirements."
One of the first projects to support was a heavily technology-based business transformation, ‘Data Futures’, which was designed to wholly upgrade HESA’s existing infrastructure. The goal was to build a new technology platform within AWS that was fit for the digital age and would drive efficiencies in the higher education sector. Embedding data protection controls whilst maintaining a streamlined and agile programme of work was essential, given the scale and value of the project.
HESA’s named DPO supported across the entire programme, implementing a governance structure, offering complex technical advice in real-time throughout development, and ensuring that data protection was embedded by design. This was further supported by penetration tests from Bridewell’s offensive security team to ensure the integrity of the new platform.
Further to the Data Futures project, HESA also required their named DPO to support in a merger transaction with Jisc. In this capacity, they performed all required data protection workstreams in connection with the merger. Thinking ahead, a roadmap was created by our DPO support to determine how the two separate data protection teams from each of the merger partners could be most effectively integrated after completion.
"Chris, our named DPO, has been a trusted senior partner throughout the merger."
The Results
With Bridewell’s DPO as a Service, HESA were able to rapidly bring significant data privacy expertise and experience into their organisation. With a Bridewell consultant as their named DPO, they have a highly qualified, reliable data privacy expert who singlehandedly advises the business and works with them to solve their challenges. Regularly communicating with and providing recommendations to key internal and external stakeholders, they have performed a fundamental role in major projects essential to HESA’s operations.
Leading their data privacy team, their named DPO has written the entire data privacy compliance program and provided substantial support in improving multiple data workstreams.
"With Bridewell as our named DPO, we’ve been able to hand over full responsibility to our consultant. It’s an end-to-end service and we trust in their expertise and understanding of our business to advise our board, solve our data privacy challenges, and support our business objectives."
They have helped manage resource levels of the existing data privacy team and brought on additional Bridewell consultants when needed for further support. This is not just true of their typical business as usual operations but of their role in Data Futures and the merger, where they have acted as a trusted, senior adviser.
"A lot of our external stakeholders have come to rely on Chris [our named DPO]. He has formed a significant part of day-to-day operations and is an ambassador of the company. His high performance has helped us establish a best-in-class team and has raised the status of HESA within our sector."
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.
