When organisations conduct tabletop exercises to test their crisis response capabilities, there's often a critical blind spot that undermines the entire exercise: the assumption that business-as-usual tools will remain available during a crisis. This oversight represents a fundamental flaw in operational resilience planning that can transform a manageable incident into a catastrophic failure.
Most tabletop exercises simulate crisis scenarios while conveniently assuming that Microsoft Teams will keep functioning, SharePoint will remain accessible, and VoIP systems will continue operating normally. Crisis teams rehearse their response protocols using the exact same digital infrastructure that would likely be the first casualty in the very incidents they're preparing for.
This is the equivalent of a fire drill where everyone assumes the building's electricity will keep working during the fire. It's not just unrealistic, it's dangerously misleading.
Consider the most common crisis scenarios facing organisations today:
Ransomware attacks that encrypt entire networks, locking teams out of email, collaboration platforms, and document repositories simultaneously.
Cyber incidents that force immediate network isolation, cutting off access to cloud-based tools and internal systems.
IT outages caused by infrastructure failures, software updates gone wrong, or third-party service disruptions that take down multiple interdependent systems.
In each of these scenarios, the communication channels your crisis team relies on daily - Teams, Slack, email, SharePoint, corporate VoIP—become instantly unavailable. Yet these are precisely the moments when rapid communication, coordination, and information sharing become mission-critical.
When primary communication channels fail during a crisis, three compounding problems emerge:
Identification becomes fragmented- Without centralised communication, different parts of the organisation receive incomplete or conflicting information about the scope and nature of the incident. Teams waste precious time trying to understand what's actually happening instead of responding to it.
Remediation gets paralysed - Technical teams can't coordinate effectively, leadership can't make informed decisions without status updates, and subject matter experts can't be consulted efficiently. What should be a coordinated response becomes a series of isolated, inefficient efforts.
Communication breaks down completely - Internal stakeholders don't know what's happening, external partners can't be kept informed, and customers receive inconsistent messages—or worse, no communication at all. The crisis escalates not just due to the original incident, but due to the communication vacuum surrounding it.
The consequences of losing business-as-usual communication tools during a crisis are measurable and severe:
Extended recovery times - Organisations without independent communication channels take significantly longer to coordinate response efforts, make decisions, and implement solutions. Hours become days, days become weeks.
Escalating incident costs - Every additional hour of downtime compounds financial losses—from lost revenue and productivity to regulatory penalties and emergency response expenses. Research consistently shows that organisations with robust out-of-band communication capabilities recover faster and at lower cost.
Reputational damage - When organisations can't communicate effectively during a crisis, stakeholders lose confidence. The inability to provide timely, accurate updates can damage relationships with customers, partners, and regulators that took years to build.
True operational resilience requires crisis management capabilities that exist independently of your primary IT infrastructure. This is where platforms like YUDU Sentinel become essential rather than optional.
An out-of-band crisis management platform operates on separate infrastructure, ensuring that when your main systems go dark, your crisis response capabilities remain fully functional. This means:
Secure chat and collaboration that keeps crisis teams connected regardless of what's happening to Teams or Slack. Team members can communicate in real-time, share critical updates, and coordinate response efforts without depending on compromised infrastructure.
Video crisis rooms that enable leadership decision-making even when standard conferencing tools are unavailable. Executive teams can convene virtually to assess the situation, make strategic decisions, and provide direction—all through channels completely independent of the affected systems.
Mass notification capabilities that ensure all employees, partners, and stakeholders receive consistent, timely information. When email systems are down and internal communications are compromised, out-of-band notification ensures critical messages still reach their intended recipients.
Offline documentation access to crisis response plans, contact lists, technical runbooks, and recovery procedures. When SharePoint is inaccessible and document management systems are locked, responders still have immediate access to the information they need.
If your organisation's tabletop exercises don't explicitly test scenarios where all primary communication tools are unavailable, you're not actually testing operational resilience - you're testing operational response under ideal conditions that will never exist during a real crisis.
Effective exercises should include scenarios that specifically simulate:
And most importantly, these exercises should answer the question: "How do we continue coordinating our response when none of our normal tools work?"
Operational resilience isn't about hoping your communication tools survive a crisis - it's about ensuring your crisis response capability is completely independent of the systems most likely to fail. Organisations that fail to plan for communication continuity during IT outages, ransomware attacks, and cyber incidents aren't resilient; they're merely fortunate when things go well.
The question every organisation must answer is this: When your crisis team needs to coordinate response efforts, can they do so if every tool they use daily is suddenly unavailable?
If the honest answer is no, then your operational resilience planning has a critical gap that needs addressing before - not after - the next major incident.
An out-of-band crisis management platform isn't a luxury for the overly cautious. It's the foundation upon which genuine operational resilience is built. Because when everything else fails, the ability to identify, fix, and communicate becomes the only thing standing between a challenging incident and a catastrophic failure.
To learn more about out-of-band crisis management and how organisations are protecting their operational resilience, visit www.sentinelresilience.com.