Exercise, Exercise, Exercise!

Before anyone gets too worried, the Resilience Team at RAB haven’t started a pre-Christmas health campaign… we are saving that for January!

In this case, ‘Exercise’ is in reference to Incident Exercises that form an important part of the incident planning cycle. We design exercises to test plans and procedures which have been established to respond to incidents and provide an opportunity for responding officers to “learn by doing”, helping to improve capability and confidence. Earlier this month we ran three exercises in one week for different clients. Here is a quick overview of each:

Bryan and Megan ran an exercise for the Motor Insurers’ Bureau (MIB), one of our longstanding clients. ‘Exercise Trader’ was designed to test and further enhance MIB’s preparedness to respond to terrorist related incidents. MIB’s playbooks and roles and responsibilities were practised against the fast-paced and unfolding scenario of three fatal incidents happening across a city. Exercise Trader also involved partners and had international observers online and in-person. Exercise Trader has helped identify areas for improvement that will strengthen MIB’s readiness to respond to potential future incidents.

Meanwhile, Nicky and Saajeda were at the University of Salford to conduct Exercise Flash. This was designed to test the effectiveness of their Business Continuity Plan in terms of managing and responding to a significant business disruption. The scenario involved protesters preventing access to University buildings with added disruption to a careers fair and culminating in issues affecting Media City, home of the BBC and ITV studios as well as part of the university campus. The exercise helped to identify gaps and weaknesses in their Business Continuity Plan which will be improved and refined in line with the annual planning cycle.

Last but by no means least (!), Sophie headed over to Ireland to deliver a cyber incident planning and response workshop. The workshop comprised of an interactive training session followed by a discussion-based exercise. The training covered a range of aspects including:

• The different types of cyber-attack.
• Who might be targeted in a cyber-attack any why.
• The stages of a cyber-attack.
• Protection and controls to protect, detect and respond to a cybere-attack.
• Business continuity and I.T. disaster recovery processes.

The exercise focused on a ransomware attack, how the response would be managed, how work could continue, and how I.T. services would be recovered alongside their crisis communications strategy. All who attended and completed the evaluation ranked the workshop 9 or 10 out of 10.

RAB deliver a wide range of emergency planning and exercising services for both public and private sector organisations. More information is available here on our website, or you can get in touch for an informal discussion on your specific project by email to enquiries@rabconsultants.co.uk or call our head office in Lichfield on 0330 223 6475.