Cyber Tabletop Exercises: A 2025 Must-Do for Your Business

In the first six months of 2025, cyber attackers have made one thing clear - they’re not backing down. On the contrary, they’re coming at high value industries as well as small businesses with equal aggression and persistence. Salt Typhoon and Scattered Spider have given nightmares to business leaders across the globe, making the threat landscape more ruthless than ever before.

As the lines between nation-state threats, financially motivated attackers, and insider threats blur, businesses cannot afford to rely solely on traditional cybersecurity technologies. Reactive incident handling is nothing but a recipe for utter disaster. 

It’s time to cultivate the highest degree of cyber resilience and rapid response capabilities. And Cyber Tabletop Exercises are an indispensable tool for building such resilience. 

In this article, we take a closer look at why every business must conduct effective, bi-annual effective cyber drills in 2025 and beyond.

The Urgent Need for Active Cyber Resilience and Tabletop Testing

In 2025, every business needs to prioritise Cyber Drills because they provide a safe, simulated environment to test your incident response mechanisms. These meticulously designed exercises offer a secure and controlled simulated environment, crucial for rigorously testing and refining your organisation's incident response mechanisms.

More than just a theoretical exercise, Cyber Drills serve as a practical validation of existing Incident Response Plans. They expose potential weaknesses and highlight areas for improvement.

The primary objective of cyber tabletop exercises is to ensure that plans and processes are not merely static documents. Cyber drills turn them into actionable blueprints that help you survive the intense pressures of a real-world cyberattack.

Furthermore, Cyber Drills foster a culture of preparedness and resilience within your organisation.

It’s also important to remember that one of the key reasons organisations falter during a cyber crisis isn’t a lack of sophisticated tools or next-gen firewalls. It’s human error. Miscommunication and/or lack of clarity in processes can often become the Achilles Heel in the Golden Hour. 

When a crisis hits, questions like “Who will take systems offline?”, “When do we inform the regulator?”, or “What message do we send to customers?” must be answered quickly and accurately.

Unfortunately, without rehearsals and predefined playbooks, teams often waste precious time navigating confusion.

The top benefits of Cyber Tabletop Exercises include:

Allowing you to realistically assess how well-prepared you are to detect, respond to, and recover from such threats.

Highlighting the gaps in your organisational cyber resilience.

Helping you and your team rehearse response protocols, making them a part of the muscle memory.

Fostering better cross-functional collaboration and clarity on individual roles during a crisis.

Improving executive decision-making under pressure through realistic and high-stakes simulation.

Ensuring your incident response plans, playbooks, and communication strategies are not just theoretical but tested and actionable.

Helping you remain compliant to regulatory obligations in the event of a cyber attack or data breach.

Regulatory Obligations and Compliance in 2025

Regulations in 2025 have become more stringent and enforcement more aggressive.

The following frameworks explicitly emphasise proactive cybersecurity preparedness. Some of them clearly require regular cyber resilience testing, while others mandate demonstrable proof of incident response capabilities which can be achieved through tabletop testing.

European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA): DORA requires digital operational resilience testing, including live and simulated exercises. 

EU NIS2 Directive: Mandates that essential and important entities regularly assess and test their incident response and resilience capabilities through exercises and audits.

HIPAA: Updates are expected to strengthen requirements around incident response and testing, potentially mandating more structured drills.

SEC Cyber Rules (U.S.): Public companies must report material cybersecurity incidents swiftly; while not explicitly tabletop-focused, they require demonstrable preparedness and robust incident response plans.

Organisations are expected not only to have an Incident Response Plans but also to demonstrate that it is tested. They are also mandated to show that key stakeholders are trained in their roles.

Cyber Tabletop Exercises help businesses meet these compliance expectations by creating auditable evidence of preparedness. They ensure that businesses are not just reactive but can prove their resilience posture.

Cyber Drill Success: Tailored, Expert-Conducted Exercises

You probably have a clear picture of why tabletop testing is critical in 2025. But it’s important to know how to make your cyber drills a success.

Remember, that tabletop exercises can no longer be generic simulations. They have to be tailored to mirror your specific threats and risks. The cyber attack scenarios that you simulate must be relevant to your business sector, geography, and operational structure.

For instance, a healthcare provider may simulate a ransomware attack affecting patient records and critical care devices. A financial services firm may run a scenario involving simultaneous DDoS attacks and data exfiltration on trading platforms.

By tailoring these scenarios, you can identify the exact gaps in your incident response plans, and decision-making hierarchies. This level of specificity enhances the realism and utility of the exercise, ensuring that teams walk away with actionable improvements and lessons learned.

You can refer to our Top 30 Cyber Tabletop Exercise Scenarios and build on them for your own cyber drill.

The other critical component of a successful cyber drill is the facilitator. We always recommend bringing on board an experienced external expert. The reasons for this are:

Unbiased Assessment: External experts provide an objective view. Their assessment is free from internal politics or blind spots. This ensures a more accurate evaluation of your response capabilities. 

Realistic Scenarios: They bring unparalleled global experience to the table. Their ability to design realistic, high-impact scenarios is unmatched. 

Cross-Industry Experience: External professionals draw from a broad range of incident response experiences across industries, enriching the exercise with proven best practices. 

Expert Facilitation: Skilled facilitators ensure structured execution. They keep the session focused and are able to draw meaningful insights during debriefs. They also have expertise in keeping attendees engaged and holding the attention of non-technical executives and techies alike.   

Regulatory Readiness: Many compliance frameworks expect independent validation; an external expert helps demonstrate due diligence and preparedness to regulators.

Conclusion: From Preparedness to Competitive Advantage

Cyber Tabletop Exercises in 2025 are no longer a ‘nice to have.’ They are a strategic necessity. As cyber threats become more sophisticated and damaging, and regulatory scrutiny continues to grow, organisations that fail to test their response capabilities expose themselves to significant damage.

Those that regularly run realistic, well-facilitated tabletop exercises are far better positioned to defend themselves and recover quickly.

In a world where cyber readiness is a key differentiator, these exercises are the smartest investment a business can make in 2025.

Do you want expert help in designing and conducting a truly meaningful cyber tabletop exercise for your organisation? Reach out to us at Cyber Management Alliance. We have helped over 400 organisations in the last 10 years to truly test and improve their Incident Response capabilities. Facilitated by the world’s leading Cyber Tabletop Exercise expert, our Cyber Drills are bespoke and curated specifically for your organisation and its cyber threat context.