Ready before the bad day
When an incident hits, the plan is the difference between a controlled response and an expensive improvisation. We build incident response plans and playbooks sized to your organization, then pressure-test them with your team in facilitated tabletop exercises, because an untested plan is a theory.
Who this is for
Businesses with no written incident response plan. Organizations whose framework requires one plus periodic testing: CMMC, GLBA, FFIEC, and HIPAA all do. Companies whose cyber insurance now demands documented response capability at renewal. Schools and districts that would face parents and press within hours of an incident. And teams with a plan on paper that has never once been rehearsed, which describes most plans.
The problem
In a real incident the questions arrive faster than answers: who declares it, who calls the insurer and the lawyer, when do notification clocks start, who is authorized to take systems offline, who speaks to customers, and who decides about ransom. Organizations answering those questions for the first time during the incident pay for the delay in downtime, legal exposure, and trust. Defense contractors carry an extra layer: DoD incident reporting obligations with tight timelines that most subcontractors discover too late, and regulated industries carry notification duties with real deadlines. The plan costs a fraction of the improvisation.
What is included
- Incident response plan development covering roles, severity classification, escalation, communications, and recovery.
- Scenario playbooks for your most likely incidents: ransomware, business email compromise, lost or stolen devices, vendor breaches.
- Regulatory and contractual notification mapping, including DoD reporting obligations for defense contractors and examiner expectations for financial institutions.
- Contact trees and decision authorities documented before they are needed, including insurer, counsel, and forensic response.
- Facilitated tabletop exercises: realistic scenario walkthroughs with your leadership and technical staff, complications included.
- After-action reporting with concrete plan improvements, producing the testing evidence your framework and insurer expect.
What you walk away with
- An incident response plan your team has actually read and rehearsed.
- Playbooks that turn the worst day into a checklist.
- Documented test evidence for your assessor, examiner, or insurer.
- Honest findings about where your response would break, discovered in a conference room instead of a crisis.
FAQs
Q. What does a tabletop exercise look like?
A facilitated session, typically two to three hours, walking your team through a realistic scenario in stages while we inject complications as it unfolds. No systems are touched. The value is watching your actual people make actual decisions and finding the gaps safely.
Q. We are small. Do we really need playbooks?
Small organizations need them more, because the same three people wear every hat during an incident. A playbook means the person handling it at 2 a.m. follows a checklist instead of reconstructing one.
Q. Can you help during a real incident? Our focus is preparation, and vCISO clients get priority advisory support when something happens. For hands-on forensic response we help you pre-select and pre-contract a response firm before you need one, which is itself a step in the plan, because incident-day procurement is the most expensive kind