i4 Solutions put C-suite executives inside a live cyberattack. Here’s what happened…
"The Zero Hour simulation was not a dinner with a keynote attached. It was an hour of controlled chaos that left senior leaders rethinking what 'cyber readiness' actually means." Boutros El Haddad
Nobody warned them it was starting.
One moment, security executives at i4 Solutions’ Zero Hour event were settling in for what they assumed would be another well-catered evening of vendor presentations and polite small talk. The next, the room shifted. Dossiers appeared on the table. Roles were assigned. A timer started. And, somewhere inside a fictional LNG operator called Gulf Meridian Energy WLL, something had gone very wrong.
That was the point.
The event, held in Doha on 29 April 2026, was built around a live crisis simulation designed for C-suite decision-makers. Not a tabletop exercise for IT teams. Not a conceptual walkthrough of threat landscapes. An actual ticking-clock scenario where every choice the teams made had scored consequences across three metrics: systems integrity, reputation, and regulatory standing. Get it wrong and those numbers moved. The room felt it.
“You’re not watching a crisis. You’re running one.” Attendee, after the event.
The simulation ran across two distinct crisis cases, each built around eight decision injections. At every turn, teams faced four closed options. No open-ended brainstorming, no time to consult a consultant. You pick, you move, you live with what happens next. It is the kind of structure that exposes how executives actually think under pressure, which is very different from how they say they think in a meeting room.
What set Zero Hour apart from most executive events you’ll find on the Gulf tech calendar is something that required a lot of discipline to pull off: the technology behind the simulation was never named during the exercise itself. The platforms, the capabilities, the tools that were quietly embedded into every scenario, every injection, every consequence, stayed off the table until the very end of the evening. Only then, after the teams had spent an hour leaning on those capabilities without knowing it, did the reveal happen.
“I’ve been to probably fifty of these vendor events in the last decade. I walked in expecting slides. What I got was forty-five minutes of genuinely not knowing if we were making the right call on things we do not do on a daily basis. That’s not something you forget.” — Chief Operating Officer, regional infrastructure firm
It is a brave creative choice. Most vendors can’t resist putting a logo on slide one. The Zero Hour team held off until the audience had already felt the value, which meant the reveal landed differently than any product demo could.
The C-suite audience has been talked at for years. They have sat through enough “cyber awareness” decks to last several careers. What they respond to is being made to feel something real, even when the company and the crisis are fictional. Zero Hour understood that. The format was built around it from the ground up.
“The scenarios felt local. The stakes felt real for this region. That’s a detail that gets missed at a lot of global vendor events, where you can tell the material was built somewhere else and repurposed. This wasn’t that.” — CISO, Public Sector.
Events at this level of design intentionality are genuinely rare in this market. Most technology companies still default to the safe format: a keynote, a panel, a dinner. i4 Solutions chose to do something harder and by all accounts, it paid off.
About i4 Solutions
In the fast paced, data-driven world we live in today, it is essential for businesses across different sectors to adopt new information technology solutions that are more effective to their business operations. i4 Solutions is dedicated to offering companies the technologies that enable their digital transformation journey towards improving day-to-day operations, providing valuable data and reporting, and guaranteeing a competitive advantage in the 21st century.
