In its recent Handbook on Simulation Exercises, the European Banking Authority (EBA) underscores a key best practice for risk and resilience leaders: a hybrid approach to simulation exercises. By combining AI/data simulations, tabletop exercises, and live exercises, organizations can build a more agile, data-informed, and operationally ready resilience program. The handbook serves as a strategic guide for embedding simulation exercises into resilience planning, ensuring institutions are better prepared for complex and evolving risks.
Why Does a Hybrid Approach to Testing Matter?
A hybrid strategy enabled by resilience software ensures that resilience is more than theoretical. It allows resilience and risk teams to:
- Identify the most critical scenarios through data-driven intelligence
- Stress test coordination and communication via simulated group decision-making
- Validate actual execution and field-readiness in real-world situations
By balancing strategic insight with operational execution, this approach supports a complete resilience posture, from planning to performance.
Step 1: Use AI/Data Simulations to Prioritize
Organizations are encouraged to leverage data simulations to run thousands of potential disruption scenarios using real operational inputs such as critical business services, dependencies, risk registers, and recovery strategies. This approach helps to:
- Identify vulnerabilities and breach likelihoods
- Simulate financial losses and outage impacts
- Prioritize which scenarios matter most based on data, not guesswork
By using a technique called Monte Carlo simulation, organizations can make better decisions about what to test. This method uses random sampling and repeated calculations to explore thousands of possible outcomes based on real data. Instead of guessing which scenarios might matter most, Monte Carlo simulations help teams see which events are most likely to happen and what their impact could be.
This makes it easier to confidently answer the question: “What should we test, and why?” and ensures that follow-up exercises (like tabletop drills or live simulations) focus on the most important risks.
Step 2: Run Tabletop Exercises for Coordination
Once key scenarios have been prioritized, organizations should run structured tabletop exercises to simulate those events in a controlled, discussion-based setting. These exercises replicate evolving crisis situations and test how teams respond in real time. They often include:
- AI-generated and manual injects to shape evolving situations
- Real-time impact tolerance tracking
- Collaborative issue logging and participant notes
- Automated After Action Reports with AI summaries
The goal of this stage is to build team coordination, reveal communication or process gaps, and improve decision-making under pressure. Tabletop exercises are especially valuable for testing responses to events like cyber incidents, supply chain disruptions, or natural disasters, ensuring that teams are prepared and aligned before a real event occurs.
Step 3: Conduct Live Exercises to Validate Readiness
Following simulations and tabletop sessions, the final step is to conduct full-scale live exercises. These exercises are designed to test how well teams and systems perform in real-world conditions, helping to validate overall preparedness. Key focus areas include:
- Actual response times
- Field-level coordination
- Physical asset dependencies and failovers
Live exercises bring together planning, execution, and analysis to ensure that all aspects of response (from communications to technical recovery) function as intended. By conducting these drills, organizations gain practical insights into readiness and can make informed improvements before a real disruption occurs.
Why Do Clients Trust Fusion for Hybrid Testing?
By integrating data simulations, tabletop sessions, and live exercises into a unified system, Fusion enables:
- Continuous improvement via closed-loop testing
- Simplified compliance with regulators and auditors
- Faster execution and broader coverage, thanks to automation and AI
With Fusion’s enterprise resilience software, organizations can move from reactive recovery to proactive resilience, grounded in real data, people, and processes.
Ready to evolve your resilience program? Let Fusion help you design and deploy a best-practice hybrid testing strategy aligned with industry standards and tailored to your business.
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