As cyber-attacks and large-scale outages increasingly disrupt national infrastructure, the next decade of cyber defence will depend not only on stronger prevention but on the ability to continue secure operations when critical systems, including communications, are compromised. This workshop explores how organisations can maintain control, compliance, and coordination under such conditions.

Through an interactive table-top exercise, participants will step into a simulated incident where essential infrastructure has failed or been breached. Working in small teams, attendees will be challenged to plan, prioritise, and coordinate an effective response without access to their normal communication channels. Facilitators will introduce evolving developments throughout the scenario, forcing participants to make rapid decisions as the situation changes, balancing the need for compliant communication with the operational urgency of effective remediation. The exercise concludes with a structured debrief summarising key lessons and practical actions for building resilient communication frameworks, defining minimum viable continuity channels, and incorporating out-of-band coordination into existing incident response and governance plans.

This session is suitable for CIOs, CISOs, CSOs, CEOs, COOs, CFOs, Incident Responders, Heads of Information Security, IT Managers and Threat Intelligence Analysts.

Participants will leave with a clear understanding of how to preserve decision-making and operational tempo when trusted systems are unavailable, and how pre-planning for out-of-band communication can accelerate national cyber defence in the decade ahead.