A Tabletop Exercise Tests Your Organization's Resilience

A tabletop exercise will test your team's skills and the organization's processes.

A simple role-playing session can save your company from ransomware.

A tabletop exercise is a meeting where you gather your staff, review your documentation, and discuss your communication plan. 

It's closer to a role-playing game than a straight review of your procedures. In real-life situations, the fog of war forces your staff to react and make decisions based on limited information. A simulation can quickly expose gaps in escalation, communication, and the mitigation steps you need. 

A typical scenario would be presented like this:

"You are the first Service Desk staff to arrive onsite. Your Jira queue is full of tickets saying people cannot access email or use Teams. Some users can access email, but no one can access the CRM, which requires AD Connect for authentication. What are your next steps?"

At this point, many causes could be behind those issues. In real life, this was the first indication of a ransomware attack that affected one of our MSPs. Fortunately, we isolated the damage quickly; however, it exposed a weakness in our over-reliance on certain partners.

A one-hour quarterly meeting like this can make a major difference in how quickly your staff responds to major incidents. IT work doesn't have to be dull. Give it a try.