Cybersecurity incidents can unfold in hours, but response plans often fail at the point of execution: ownership is unclear, investigation findings is difficult to access, and critical decisions are delayed. That is why incident response cannot be something your organization figures out in real time.

The Detection and Response Team (DART) – the Microsoft team that delivers Defender Experts Cybersecurity Incident Response – has supported organizations across 54 countries and regions through some of their most challenging security moments; and while we sincerely hope you never need to call us in the middle of a live incident, we do want to help you prepare for that possibility before it becomes real.

That’s exactly what the Cybersecurity Incident Response Readiness Workshop is designed to do.

What is the Cybersecurity Incident Response Readiness Workshop?

The Cybersecurity Incident Response Workshop is a collaborative, scenario driven workshop designed to evaluate your organization’s incident response (IR) plan against realistic, real-world security events, guided by DART researchers.

Rather than reviewing your plan in isolation, we work through simulated incidents together. Participants navigate realistic attack scenarios, present investigation findings, discuss decisions, and receive direct feedback from responders with extensive experience handling complex incidents worldwide.

What makes DART’s approach different?

DART’s approach combines active participation with lessons drawn from frontline incident response. Instead of reviewing a plan as a static document, the Cybersecurity Incident Response Workshop exercises how people, processes, and technology work together under pressure. Participants practice detection, containment, and response decisions while DART security researchers provide feedback grounded in real-world incident experience.

The workshop creates a controlled environment for teams to test how they detect, investigate, contain, and communicate during an incident. DART security researchers examine how people, processes, and technology work together across identity, endpoint, cloud, and communications, including whether the organization’s tools, logs, and telemetry support timely decisions against real threat actor behaviors.

Additionally, the workshop includes threat hunting exercises that let incident response teams investigate realistic scenarios with urgency but without the pressure of a live incident. This hands-on practice strengthens technical judgment and helps teams coordinate their response more effectively.

Why organizations run this workshop

The goal is not to pass or fail. It’s to discover how well your organization can make and execute critical response decisions under pressure, and where preparation today can prevent delay during a real incident.

During the Workshop, organizations are able to:

• Compare and contrast their incident response plan with insights drawn from DART’s experience across thousands of real‑world cases.
• Exercise response processes using real-world scenarios to identify strengths and improvement opportunities, including processes, threat hunting techniques, and the use of cybersecurity technologies.
• Identify potential gaps in both tools and procedures before a threat actor finds them.

In short: it’s a chance to see what holds up under pressure, where coordination or visibility begins to bend, and what your organization should reinforce before a threat actor puts the response plan to the test.

Our approach: How we assess your maturity

The workshop blends structured analysis with hands-on knowledge transfer, creating an experience that is both evaluative and practical.

The assessment examines how your organization’s people, processes, and technology support incident response across identity, endpoint, cloud, and communications. It also evaluates whether available tools and telemetry provide the visibility needed to respond to real threat actor tactics.

Additional knowledge transfer is delivered through interactive exercises led by DART, encouraging cross-team collaboration while sharing proven detection and containment practices drawn from real incidents.

What organizations walk away with

By the end of the workshop, organizations leave with a clearer view of how their incident response capability performs today and where focused improvements can strengthen readiness. You’ll take away:

• Clear identification of strengths and opportunities in IR preparation and execution.
• Insight into how tools, techniques, and available data perform during an incident.
• A summary of findings and prioritized recommendations to help strengthen incident response readiness and guide next steps.

Scope and structure

The engagement begins by aligning on objectives, participants, logistics, and expected outcomes so the scenarios and discussions can be tailored to the organization’s needs

The workshop spans 2 or 3 days, including:

• Kick off and introductions to understand who the audience is and what they hope to gain from the workshop; this helps us tailor our delivery approach for each unique organization
• Knowledge-transfer sessions
• Scenarios and guided discussions assessing current capabilities
• Closeout and recommended next steps

Practice before it matters

If your incident response plan lives mostly on paper, or if it’s never been exercised with the people who will use it, the Cybersecurity Incident Response Workshop provides a safe, structured way to change that. When a real incident happens, you don’t want your first conversation about roles, investigation findings, or decision-making to happen in the middle of a crisis.

Don’t wait for a live incident to test your response plan, if you have an established Unified Enterprise agreement with Microsoft, reach out to your Customer Success Account Manager (CSAM) to schedule a Cybersecurity Incident Response Workshop and give your teams the opportunity to practice before it matters most.

Learn more

• To learn more about DART capabilities, please visit our website, or contact your Microsoft Customer Success Account Manager or Premier Support contact.
• For the latest security research from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence community, check out the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Blog.
• To get notified about new publications and to join discussions on social media, follow us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Bluesky.
• To hear stories and insights from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence community about the ever-evolving threat landscape, listen to the Microsoft Threat Intelligence podcast.