A custom scenario built around a critical vendor or cloud provider failure — testing failover decisions, recovery prioritization, and regulatory notification.
Most organizations don't control their most critical dependencies. This exercise tests how your team makes failover and recovery decisions when a vendor or cloud provider can't tell you when service will return.
Your primary cloud provider reports a regional outage affecting core services.
A critical third-party vendor confirms they cannot provide an ETA for restoration.
Customer-facing transactions begin failing.
Your team must decide whether to fail over to a backup provider with known limitations.
A regulator requests confirmation that critical services remain available.
The outage passes four hours. Recovery time objectives are now in question.
A half-day executive tabletop built on this scenario, adapted to your real critical services and dependencies. Engagements generally begin at $15,000.
Facilitated live, plus a decision log, an after-action report, and a board-ready summary.
Design brief · custom scenario & injects · live facilitation · decision log · after-action report · board-ready summary
For a multi-scenario program that includes an observed functional or disaster-recovery test, see The Full Break.
It complements one — this exercise tests the decisions and coordination around an outage, and can be paired with an observed functional or DR test in The Full Break.
The scenario is built from your real critical services and third-party dependencies, but a full vendor risk assessment is a separate, deeper engagement.
The exercise is designed to align with operational resilience expectations common in financial services and other regulated industries.
Reach out directly. All inquiries are confidential.
Exercises often require access to crisis plans, escalation structures, and vulnerabilities. That material is handled in confidence, and NDAs are available on request.
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The Crisis Studio