Incident Response & Security Operations Toolkit — Playbooks, Tabletops, SOC Readiness (Word + Excel)

The complete working system for responding to security incidents — and for running the security-operations routines that keep one incident from becoming the next one. An incident response plan, seven step-by-step playbooks, a tabletop exercise kit, pre-approved communications, a post-incident review template, and the Excel registers and trackers that turn incidents into permanent improvement.

Framework stack:

• NIST SP 800-61 — the incident response life cycle: preparation, detection & analysis, containment / eradication / recovery, post-incident activity (Rev. 3 maps it to the CSF 2.0 Respond and Recover functions)
• ISO/IEC 27035 — incident management principles, planning and operations
• NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 — Respond (RS) and Recover (RC) categories for executive and auditor reporting
• CIS Critical Security Controls v8 — Control 17 (Incident Response Management) and Control 7 (Continuous Vulnerability Management), supported by Controls 8, 10, 11 and 13
• MITRE ATT&CK — detection use cases framed as attacker behaviours

What's included (11 items):

• Start Here Guide — how the plan, playbooks, tabletops and registers operate as one loop, and the customisation order
• Incident Response Plan Template — severity model (SEV1–SEV4), roles and deputies, escalation and notification clocks, evidence handling, NIST life cycle end to end
• Incident Playbooks — ransomware, business email compromise, malware outbreak, insider incident, DDoS, lost or stolen device, cloud account compromise; each with triage, containment, eradication, recovery and communication steps
• Tabletop Exercise Kit — facilitator guide, three full scenarios with timed injects (ransomware Friday, BEC payment fraud, cloud account compromise), a six-dimension scoring rubric, and after-action prompts
• Incident Communications Templates — internal alert, staff notice, customer notice, regulator / law-enforcement notification worksheet, media holding statement
• Post-Incident Review Template — timeline reconstruction, root-cause analysis (5 Whys), impact assessment, action tracker, sign-off
• Vulnerability Management Programme Guide — scanning cadence, CVSS severity SLAs, patch governance rings, and a governed exception / risk-acceptance process with approval levels and maximum durations
• Incident Register (Excel) — every incident with type, severity, owner, status and PIR linkage, plus a live summary by severity, status and type
• Vulnerability Management Tracker (Excel) — findings with automatic severity from CVSS, SLA days and due-date calculation, overdue flags, and live summary counts
• SOC Readiness Checklist (Excel) — 29 readiness items across people, process, technology, log sources and detection use cases, with maturity ratings and an overall readiness score
• Copyright & Licence Terms

Who it's for: CISOs and security leads, SOC and IT operations managers, incident response managers, GRC teams preparing for ISO 27001 / SOC 2 evidence on incident management, and consultants building response capability for clients.

Please note: Templates and general information, not legal advice, certification, or a guarantee of compliance with any framework named. Breach-notification duties differ by jurisdiction and sector — the templates use bracketed placeholders for your confirmed clocks. Framework mappings are a working consolidation — verify against the official publications.

Copyright & licence: © 2026 Zee Consulting. All rights reserved. This product and everything in it is the intellectual property of Zee Consulting. Your purchase gives one named organization a licence to use and customize the documents for its own internal business — nothing more. The files must not be resold, shared, redistributed, sublicensed, or given to clients or any other organization, in original or modified form. Anyone who uses these materials without a licence is infringing copyright, and Zee Consulting reserves the right to pursue litigation and claim damages and legal costs to the fullest extent permitted by law. The full Copyright & Licence Terms are included in the download (Copyright_and_Licence_Terms.docx) and inside the Start Here guide.

Requirements: Microsoft Word and Excel (or compatible: Google Docs/Sheets, LibreOffice). Instant download after purchase — no shipping, no waiting.