We are delighted to introduce to our Student Network the Virtual Table Top Exercise provided by Deltar Strategic for all our members to participate!
Deltar Strategic offers a platform that enables security professionals to test and plan their mitigation strategy during a crisis. This is a great opportunity for our student network to test more practically and comprehensively what they have been taught. Simultaneously participants can get a real experience of what is to manage a crisis through management level institutional positions.
The Deltar Strategic platform is user-friendly. Its design is catching everyone’s eye and attracts people to be more engaged in the simulation. It gives the chance for players to be remotely interconnected and mitigate any incident from different places. Exactly as any other real-life incident where specialists have to communicate from different places.
The user is introduced to a mailing platform, where he/she gets all the information for the escalation of incidents. Reports will be received to the inbox that the security specialist will have to assess and communicate to the other participants. Not everyone necessarily has access to all the information. That is a critical point where the real challenges of communication will appear. First, because there will certainly be an influx of information as the crisis develops and secondary as each player will have to short out what is relevant and what is not while having to take decisive action.
Purpose
The purpose of the VTTX is to point out stress in communications during a crisis scenario. The exercise can give a concrete result on which actors are getting more stressed and can identify the failure points to any plan. When designing a strategy for a certain threat everything seems logical and well adjusted on paper. Reality though is always unexpected and different from what we initially thought. That is why the Deltar Strategic platform can train security professionals on being more resilient with their strategies and mitigation plans by identifying where exactly failure points appear.
The e-mail based design of Deltar Strategic simulates communications as they usually are. Many people with different competencies sitting in different places have to work together in order to protect people and critical infrastructure. The communication challenge is always there and it is the variant that renders a plan successful or failure. For this reason, you are encouraged to communicate consistently with your colleagues and together assess the information you receive before you take collective action against any threat you have to deal with. The simulation involves three different phases. The planning phase, Crisis Phase and Recovery. Every phase is interconnected with the previous and decisions made will affect the outcome of the simulation.
The comparative advantage of the Deltar Strategic Platform is the analytics offering in the aftermath of the simulation. Participants can see the results of the simulation depicted in charts and can assess what are the weak points of the strategy they developed. Which were the critical points? Which actors were more stressed? What mistakes occurred at the execution phase?
All the useful answers are given by the well-designed analytics as demonstrated here. The debriefing phase makes the participants reflect on their decisions and plans and then assess their actions. This is a great tool for all security managers to develop a mindset that will allow them to be effective when a real crisis strikes their organisation.