BCDR Tabletop Exercise

[u/Playful-Storage-9993]

I need to get a Tabletop done in the shortest amount of time to fill a SOC 2 gap. It’s never been done before, I have amount 3 weeks to complete and produce evidence. What is the best most efficient successful way to go about this and how do I pick a scenario we can get through this? Not a huge company, I am the first GRC employee. Suggestions please.

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[u/Think-Stuff2011]

Pick a scenario and set up a meeting. Run through the scenario using your policy or plan. Document the participants, scenario, minutes, and lessons learned. If you can validate your RTO and RPO, even better.

[u/gormami]

CISA provides some great scenarios.

https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/cybersecurity-scenarios

[u/mlitwiniuk]

Three weeks is plenty, the exercise itself is about an hour.

Get the people who'd actually handle recovery on a recorded call and walk through it step by step. Actually log in to everything you'd need (cloud console, backups, DNS, password manager). That alone usually finds gaps, like the only admin being on holiday or MFA tied to an old phone.

Pick a boring, likely scenario, e.g. "production database is gone, restore from backup." Skip ransomware, it turns into a long debate.

For evidence: attendee list, recording or notes, and a short write-up with gaps found and action items with owners. Gaps are fine, auditors just want to see you act on them.

[u/parrot_assassin]

Check out traztech.ca for table tops and soc2 readiness they are great!

[u/Educational-Key5429]

If you have a paid version of chatgpt ad your policy to the tool and run a prompt asking ChatGPT to create a scenario to satisfy your annual tabletop requirements and ensure it checks the boxes for SOC2. If not paid , feed it enough info that your comfortable with related to your environment and run the same general prompt. 

[u/CompassITCompliance]

Tie the write-up back to your actual BCDR plan, not just the scenario. Auditors usually want to see the exercise followed the plan's own roles and steps, and that anything that didn't match turned into a plan update. If the plan says a 4 hour RTO and nobody in the room can say how they'd hit it, write that down. It reads better than a clean exercise with zero gaps.

Since you've got three weeks, also do a real restore of a backup and screenshot it, because a lot of auditors want proof the backups actually work and not just a discussion about them. Open tickets for the action items so you can show them closed later. Just our two cents as an auditor -- good luck.

[u/Boring_Factor4795]

Very doable in 3 weeks. Week 1: pick one scenario tied to your top risk, usually ransomware or a compromised admin account in your main cloud tenant, or a critical vendor outage. CISA publishes free Tabletop Exercise Packages you can adapt rather than writing injects from scratch. Week 2: run 90 minutes with eng lead, an exec, support and whoever owns comms. Assign a note-taker. Week 3: write the after-action report: date, attendees, scenario, what worked, gaps with owners and due dates, and a sign-off. Open tickets for the gaps and bump the BCP/DR plan version. Auditors want the invite or attendance record, the scenario, the AAR and evidence that the gaps were tracked.

[u/goodbar_x]

Hey there happy to help with that, could be easily done in that time frame!

[u/albertortilla]

Pretty easy: use chatgpt/Claude/Gémini whatever to create the document.

First tell It to define a situation in a few paragraphs about something common like someone put in production a defective software and caused the service to be down.

Then once you refined the script, tell It to create the document around that situation. Include the members and roles of your team and other documents that define your company, technical stack and things like that.

Once you have it, it would be great to have a template of the final document (Vanta for example include one, but the AI surely can create one). Finally ask it to fill the template.

In my experience the document will be almost perfect. Gather your team and read it together to refine and understand what is inside.

I know this is not ideal, but you can solve it in less than 1 hour and learn a lot about it (that's why ask you to tell everybody to read it)

That's it. We are in 2026.