Webinar Description
Key Takeaways
- Interactive ransomware simulation placing participants in leadership roles during a fictional cyber crisis
- Designed for CISOs, CIOs, IT managers and disaster recovery specialists at medium to large enterprises
- Focuses on incident response decision-making, business continuity and data protection strategies
- Hosted by Commvault and Microsoft with Presidio as a partner
- Scenario-based learning drawn from recent high-profile ransomware breaches
Introduction
Minutes to Meltdown is an immersive ransomware simulation event that challenges enterprise IT and security leaders to navigate the critical hours following a catastrophic cyber attack. Hosted by Commvault and Microsoft, the in-person workshop places attendees in executive decision-making roles at a fictional organisation under siege, testing their ability to coordinate disaster recovery efforts while operations hang in the balance. With ransomware incidents continuing to disrupt organisations across every sector, the event addresses a pressing need for practical crisis management experience that traditional training programmes often fail to deliver.
About This Event
The simulation adopts a branching narrative structure where participants face sequential decision points modelled on real-world ransomware scenarios. Each choice triggers consequences that shape the unfolding crisis, mirroring the cascading pressures that security teams encounter during actual incidents. Cybersecurity experts guide attendees through the exercise, providing context on attacker tactics and recovery options as the situation develops.
Rather than presenting ransomware response as a theoretical exercise, the format compresses the chaos of a genuine breach into a controlled environment. Participants must weigh competing priorities—containing the threat, preserving forensic evidence, communicating with stakeholders and restoring critical systems—under time constraints that reflect the urgency of real incidents.
Ransomware Response and Recovery Under Pressure
The core curriculum centres on the operational realities of ransomware incidents. Participants explore how initial detection cascades into organisation-wide disruption, examining the technical and human factors that determine whether recovery takes days or weeks. The simulation draws on patterns observed in recent high-profile breaches, grounding abstract concepts in documented attack sequences.
Disaster recovery planning receives particular emphasis. Many organisations maintain backup infrastructure and documented procedures yet struggle to execute them under pressure. The event exposes gaps between theoretical preparedness and practical capability, highlighting where assumptions about recovery time objectives may not survive contact with an actual incident.
Building Cyber Resilience Beyond Prevention
Contemporary cybersecurity strategy increasingly acknowledges that prevention alone cannot eliminate ransomware risk. Sophisticated threat actors routinely bypass perimeter defences, making resilience—the ability to maintain operations and recover quickly—a critical organisational capability. The simulation reinforces this shift in perspective, treating successful recovery as a measure of security maturity alongside traditional prevention metrics.
Data protection architecture plays a central role in this resilience posture. The relationship between backup integrity, network segmentation and recovery speed becomes tangible as participants discover how architectural decisions made months earlier constrain their options during the crisis. This connection between infrastructure planning and incident outcomes underscores why cyber resilience requires sustained investment rather than reactive spending after an attack.
Who Should Attend
The event targets senior technology and security professionals responsible for protecting enterprise environments. CISOs and security directors will find value in stress-testing their incident response frameworks, while CIOs and IT managers can evaluate how their infrastructure and teams would perform under genuine attack conditions. Disaster recovery specialists and business continuity planners benefit from experiencing the cross-functional coordination that ransomware incidents demand.
Medium to large enterprises represent the primary audience, reflecting the scale of operations where ransomware attacks create the most complex recovery challenges. Organisations in regulated industries may find particular relevance given the compliance implications of extended outages and potential data exposure.
Practical Outcomes for Organisational Preparedness
Participants leave with more than experiential learning. The event provides structured resources designed for immediate application within their own organisations. These materials support the translation of simulation insights into concrete improvements to incident response plans, communication protocols and recovery procedures. For security leaders seeking to build internal support for resilience investments, the firsthand experience of simulated crisis conditions offers a compelling foundation for stakeholder conversations.