A facilitated walk-through of a realistic disaster with the people who would actually have to deal with it: ransomware, a fire, a flood, a supplier that folds overnight. No systems are touched. The point is to find out who does what, before it matters.
Price: From £595. Half a day, onsite across West Sussex or live online.
How long: Two to three hours, plus a short call beforehand. Who it is for: Owners, managers, finance and whoever looks after IT, in the same room.
A tabletop exercise is a conversation, not a technical test. Everyone sits down, a realistic disaster unfolds, and the group works out what they would do. Nothing is plugged in, nothing is attacked, and nobody needs to be technical.
It is the cheapest way to find out that three people each think a fourth has the backups, that the only person who can lock an account is on holiday, or that nobody knows who rings the customers. Those discoveries are uncomfortable in a meeting room and expensive at eight on a Monday morning.
Not every disaster is a cyber attack. Fire, flood, a burst pipe upstairs, a key supplier going under and the one person who understands the invoicing being in hospital all stop a business just as effectively, and the response is largely the same set of decisions.
We pick a scenario that could genuinely happen to you. A ransomware note on the shared drive, no access to the building on a Monday, an invoice paid to a criminal, a supplier that has stopped answering the phone. Generic scenarios get generic answers.
The scenario unfolds in stages. New information arrives as you go, the way it does in reality, and the group decides what to do at each point. We facilitate, keep it moving and make sure the quiet people get heard.
Who rings the bank. Who talks to customers. What do we tell staff. When do we notify the ICO. Who decides whether to pay. These are the questions that stall a real response.
We finish with what went well and what did not, then send a short written report a few days later while it is still fresh.
It is not a penetration test and not a technical assessment. Nobody attacks your systems and nothing gets broken. If what you want is somebody trying to get in, that is a different piece of work and we will say so. It is also not a substitute for a written continuity plan: an exercise shows you where the gaps are, and something still has to be written down afterwards or the same gaps are there next year. A tabletop tells you about decisions, roles and communication, which is where most small business disruptions actually go wrong.
See the free resources: The one-page first hour card covers what to do and what not to do when something goes wrong, and the continuity plan template gives you the questions an exercise will ask. If you cannot fill in the "who to call" line on either, that is worth half an hour of somebody’s time this week.