Incident Readiness & retainers
Cube Cyber's incident readiness services prepare Australian organisations for the incident before it happens, response plans and playbooks built for your environment and obligations, tabletop exercises that put executives and technical teams under realistic pressure, and retainers that put our responders on call with your context already loaded. The organisations that recover fastest are the ones that decided who does what before the phone rang.
Talk To Us About Incident Readiness
Readiness gaps look theoretical until the day they are not:
Readiness is cheapest when nothing is on fire, and the strongest triggers are near misses, an incident elsewhere in your sector, board and insurer questions about response capability, and obligations that assume preparedness, APRA-regulated entities and SOCI-covered operators in particular. A retainer conversation also follows naturally from other work: clients of our monitoring, MDR and architecture services add response cover because the context is already loaded, but a retainer stands perfectly well alone, and is the single cheapest insurance in cybersecurity.
Core capabilities & deliverables
Incident response retainers
Pre-agreed commercial terms, escalation contacts, defined playbooks and priority access to our responders, with onboarding that loads your environment context before anything happens, so response starts at the phone call, not after the paperwork.
Incident response planning
Response plans built for your organisation rather than adapted from a template, roles and authorities, severity definitions, decision trees, communication protocols and the regulatory pathways, written to be used at 2am by stressed people.
Playbook development
Scenario-specific playbooks for the incidents that actually happen, ransomware, business email compromise, data theft, insider events, OT incidents, each with the first-hour actions, containment options and escalation triggers spelled out.
Tabletop exercises
Facilitated scenarios that put executives and technical teams through realistic incident decisions, discovering the gaps, the missing authority, the unclear handover, the notification nobody owns, while the stakes are still zero. Executive and technical streams run together or separately.
Regulatory readiness
Notification obligations mapped in advance, Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, APRA CPS 234, SOCI reporting, with decision criteria and draft templates prepared, so the compliance clock never starts before your understanding does.
Readiness assessment
An honest evaluation of current response capability, plans, people, telemetry, backups, retainers, against the incident types you are most likely to face, producing a prioritised uplift path.
Readiness engagements follow four stages:
Assess
Current-state review of plans, capability and obligations, including what your telemetry and backups could actually support in a crisis.
Build
Plans, playbooks and regulatory pathways developed with the people who would use them, ownership assigned by name and role, not by department.
Exercise
Tabletop scenarios that test the plan and the people, with findings captured as specific fixes rather than general lessons.
Sustain
Regular exercise cadence, plan maintenance as the organisation changes, and retainer onboarding kept current, readiness decays, so the rhythm matters.
Plans and playbooks align to NIST SP 800-61 and ACSC incident management guidance, and map your obligations under the Privacy Act's Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, APRA CPS 234 and the SOCI Act. Retainer clients are onboarded into our response systems with environment context, contacts and authorities documented, the same preparation our responders rely on at 2am.
NIST SP 800-61
SOCIAPRAFrequently asked questions
Pre-agreed commercial terms, named escalation contacts, priority access to our responders, and onboarding that documents your environment, authorities and playbooks in advance. When you call, response begins immediately, no procurement, no discovery phase, no explaining your network while it burns.
They solve different problems, and they work best together. Insurance funds response; a retainer delivers it, immediately, with your context loaded. Insurer panels can appoint capable firms, but panel appointment takes time and starts from zero knowledge of your environment.
A facilitated scenario, realistic for your sector and environment, walked through in real time: the alert arrives, facts emerge incrementally, and your team makes the actual decisions, isolate or observe, pay attention to the ransom question, notify or wait, who speaks. Two to four hours typically, executive and technical streams, and a findings report that converts every stumble into a specific fix.
At least annually, ideally every six months, and after material change, new leadership, new systems, new obligations, or a real incident elsewhere in the group. Plans decay quietly: people move, systems change, authorities blur. Regular exercise is what keeps the plan a capability instead of a document.
More than IT: executives who hold shutdown and notification authority, legal and privacy, communications, HR for insider and staff-impact scenarios, and operations in OT environments. Incidents are business crises with a technical core, and plans built only inside IT fail at exactly the moment they escalate beyond it.
Directly. CPS 234 expects tested response plans and timely incident notification; SOCI carries reporting obligations with short clocks. Readiness work maps these pathways in advance, evidences the testing, and gives your compliance position substance, the difference between asserting preparedness and demonstrating it.
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