Industry: IT & Tech Services
Service: Professional Services
Location: APAC
Organization Type: Private
Employees: 10,001+
Needs And Requirements:
As cyber threats grew increasingly complex and client expectations around security governance intensified, the company identified a need to evaluate the maturity and coordination of its incident response capabilities. While security controls were in place, leadership lacked clarity on how well internal teams would respond during a real-world security event. The objective was to conduct tabletop exercises to simulate cyber incidents, validate roles and responsibilities, assess decision-making under pressure, and highlight gaps in the company’s governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) framework—without disrupting daily operations.
Main Challenges:
Client and Regulatory Pressure: Enterprise clients began requesting evidence of incident response readiness, and the company needed to demonstrate that its GRC program included real-world resilience testing.
Unclear Roles and Escalation Paths: The incident response process existed on paper but had never been tested, leaving teams uncertain about real-time decision-making and communication flows.
Low Cross-Departmental Preparedness: Security, IT, legal, and communications teams had limited practice working together during a cybersecurity event, risking delays and missteps in a crisis.
Solution:
Governance, Risk & Compliance: Hitachi Cyber conducted a structured tabletop exercise tailored to simulate realistic cybersecurity incidents relevant to the client’s environment—ranging from ransomware outbreaks to third-party data exposure. The exercise included stakeholders from IT, security, legal, operations, and executive leadership. Scenarios were designed to test not just technical response, but also strategic decision-making, internal communications, regulatory notification workflows, and client impact analysis. Following the session, Hitachi Cyber provided a debrief report that captured key observations, strengths, and response gaps, along with actionable recommendations to improve policies, playbooks, and cross-functional coordination.
Outcomes:
The exercise revealed significant strengths in executive engagement and high-level incident awareness, while also uncovering improvement areas in communication timelines and documentation practices. It enabled the client to update its incident response plan, clarify escalation triggers, and improve collaboration between teams. More importantly, it built confidence across the organization in its ability to respond quickly and effectively to cyber events, helping satisfy growing customer and regulatory scrutiny.
Next Steps:
The client plans to integrate tabletop exercises into its annual GRC roadmap and expand future sessions to include external stakeholders such as third-party vendors and managed service providers. They will also revise internal response documentation based on the feedback received, and conduct targeted training sessions to ensure team members understand their roles during security incidents. A follow-up exercise has been scheduled for the next fiscal year to test progress and simulate more complex scenarios.
