One of the pillars of a solid security plan is ensuring all employees are aware of the plan and have the tools and resources they need to contribute to overall company security. Employee negligence is a huge factor in business vulnerability. (81% of all data breaches are because of poor passwords!) Without knowledge of what to look for and how to implement secure best practices, employees can be more hindrance than help in terms of protecting your business.
How Does Security Awareness Training Help Protect Businesses?
Security awareness training is part of an overall cyber security presence.
Know your enemy. It’s hard to know what to protect against unless you understand the environment. By knowing what a phishing attack looks like, or what kinds of messages may carry malware, you’re much more likely to fall prey to it. Understanding the threat is the first step to stopping it.
Improve your culture. By engaging in specific security awareness training, you recast your culture in the light of greater security. The training itself sends a message that the company cares enough about security to engage in the training. And by carrying out the training, individual employees are empowered to address issues of security, which in turn shores up the cultural transformation.
Protect your bottom line. Not only does security awareness training help improve asset protection—a 2017 Ponemon report notes that the average cost of a security breach is $3.62 million—but security awareness training also helps protect against downtime. The costs of downtime vary wildly, as do those of security breaches, but a prevented attack means normal, revenue-generating operations.
Future-proof security. By knowing what to look for in current attacks, you stand a better chance of fending them off. Yet, you also provide the groundwork for protecting your future operations as well. When an attack happens that you haven’t trained for, you can gather data about the attack and disseminate that data to other organizations. Plus, even familiar attacks can be sources of risk data, and employees can help by forwarding phishing emails to security staff instead of just deleting them.
How to Put Security Awareness Training to Work in Your Own Operations
Security awareness training is the bedrock on which cyber security operates, and to get the best therein, start by reaching out to us at SinglePoint Global. Our managed security operations start with security awareness training, as well as phishing simulations, and go on from there to include a range of options like antivirus and malware detection systems. No matter where you are in the cyber security spectrum, extra awareness never hurts, and by getting in touch with us, you start your company on a path to a much safer operation.
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