// Comparison

Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercises vs RGPD et droit des données personnelles: Which Should You Read?

Two cybersecurity books on Policy, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.

Intermediate

4/52024

From Planning to Execution

Robert Lelewski, John Hollenberger

Two veteran security consultants walk through planning, running, and following up on tabletop exercises, from technical incident-response drills to executive-level and cross-functional scenarios.

Intermediate

3/52021

RGPD et droit des données personnelles

Fabrice Mattatia

A complete French manual on data-protection law under the GDPR and the 2018 loi Informatique et Libertés — obligations, rights and how to comply — by an engineer and doctor of law.

Read this if

Incident responders, security managers, and anyone tasked with improving an organization's readiness who needs to actually run a tabletop, not just read about why they matter. Includes ready-to-adapt scenarios, injects, and storyboards for technical, executive, and cross-functional exercises.

DPOs, developers, managers and students who need a clear, structured guide to GDPR obligations and French data-protection law in practice.

Skip this if

Readers looking for incident-response technique itself (forensics, containment, eradication); this book is about rehearsing and testing a response plan, not executing one. Pair with Incident Response and Computer Forensics or Intelligence-Driven Incident Response for that side.

Readers outside the EU legal context, or anyone wanting security technique; it's a legal-compliance manual, and law changes, so check the latest edition.

Key takeaways

Splits cleanly into process (how to plan, facilitate, and evaluate an exercise) and content (ready-made scenarios across technical, executive, and cross-functional levels).
Facilitation technique gets real attention — keeping participants engaged is treated as a skill, not an afterthought.
Evaluation and follow-up are covered as seriously as the exercise itself, closing the loop that many tabletop efforts skip.

A clear, complete French manual on GDPR and data-protection law for non-lawyers.
Mattatia is both an engineer and a doctor of law, so it bridges technical and legal worlds.
Law evolves: use the most recent edition and verify against current CNIL guidance.

How they compare

We rate Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercises higher (4/5 against 3/5 for RGPD et droit des données personnelles). For most readers, that means Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercises is the primary pick and RGPD et droit des données personnelles is a useful follow-up.

Both books target intermediate-level readers, so the choice is about topic, not difficulty.

Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercises and RGPD et droit des données personnelles both cover Policy, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercises

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