The Benefits of Cyber Security Awareness Training
Cyber Security Awareness Training is one of the best ways to help protect your business from malicious actors and prevent possible breaches. A compromise of valuable data resulting from a cyber-attack is possibly the greatest threat to your business, right now. There are a plethora of tools available to help protect your systems and mitigate risk and your business likely employs several of them. Many of these tools are excellent and vital to your cyber defences, however, none of them will protect you 100%. It’s much like the old Domestos advertisement that claimed it “kills 99% of all known germs”. You see the 99% and think, that’s really good but what they are also telling you is that they can’t kill all germs. Cybersecurity tools are much the same. What many of these tools don’t account for is the human factor. People are creatures of habit and cybercriminals are counting on our bad habits to launch a successful attack. You might think that this would make your employees the weakest link when in fact it’s quite the opposite. If you provide them with the right tools to heighten their cyber awareness, they quickly become your best defence. Here are 6 benefits of Cyber Security Awareness Training and why your organisation should implement it, right now.
Helps Prevent Breaches and Attacks
The first and perhaps most important benefit of Cyber security Awareness Training is that it can help prevent cyber-attacks from being successful. Although some cybercriminals adopt sophisticated techniques, most attacks are actually fairly unsophisticated in nature. Taking the time to teach your employees how to spot the signs and what to do in the event of a suspected attack can make all the difference.
Builds a Security-Minded Culture
Cyber Security Awareness training will not be effective in improving security outcomes if it is not accompanied by cultural change. Comprehensive training will teach end-users how to recognise situations where security is at risk and how to deal with them appropriately, but this knowledge is not going to be put into practice unless the user feels that security is valued in their culture.
Allows you to identify your Human Risk
Technology alone isn’t enough to safeguard your business and it’s reported that human error was a contributing factor in 95% of all breaches. Calculating your human risk allows you to identify the gaps in your human cyber defences so that you can concentrate cyber training on these areas first. With our service, we first send your employees a gap analysis questionnaire to determine their level of cyber awareness and tailor the training modules for each employee, based on the results of this analysis. From here our service calculates human risk using an algorithm that looks at several factors including:
- Level of dark web exposure
- Performance in phishing simulations
- Completion rate and average grade in training courses
To give you a better idea of your organisation’s human risk we can provide you with a Free Human Risk report.
Reduces Downtime and Remediation
Downtime resulting from a cyber-attack can be costly both financially and in terms of lost productivity. Depending on the nature and scale of the attack, remediation can be hugely expensive. This can largely be avoided by ensuring your team have a high level of Cyber Security Awareness.
Helps to Safeguard Corporate and Client Data
Data is now seen as the most valuable commodity in the world and your IT systems store an incredible amount of it. In the past cyber-criminals would enter your systems via a phishing attack and lock you out by encrypting your data. They would then demand a ransom to provide you with the encryption keys to restore your access. As seen in many more recent attacks including the one on the Irish Health Service Executive (HSE) they are now more interested in stealing your data and ransoming it back to you. If you don’t pay and, in many cases, even if you do, they release or sell your data on the dark web to unscrupulous actors.
Gives your Customers Confidence
Reputation is everything in business. The success of your relationships with clients is largely built on trust. If data relating to your clients or business partners is compromised resulting from a cyber-attack, you are very likely to damage that relationship and lose their trust. By highlighting to clients and potential clients that your team continually undergo Cyber Security Awareness Training, you are giving them confidence that their valuable data can be trusted in your hands. Cyber Security Awareness Training doesn’t just benefit you. It benefits your customers, your suppliers and everyone else interlinked with your network.
To learn more about our Cyber Security Awareness Training service our request a Free Human Risk Report for your organisation then, please follow the link.
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