In today’s digital environment, businesses, from small enterprises to established corporations, are constantly exposed to security risks. Most are continuing to face sophisticated cyberthreats that have the potential to undermine business continuity in their digital footprint. Thus, a cybersecurity strategy must be created enough to aid businesses in operating safely. It should be vigilant in the face of cyber threats and demonstrating resilience in the case of an attack. However, budget constraints and the IT team’s inability to keep up with known and emerging threats may impede the maturity of cybersecurity awareness programs in your business.
Importance Of Cybersecurity Maturity
Cybersecurity maturity refers to your company’s ability and level of preparedness to address vulnerabilities and dangers posed by hackers. A company’s mature cybersecurity rules and processes are better at preventing cyberattacks. These days, it is critical to keep cybercriminals at bay. Even a single data breach might lead to a financial calamity. As a result, the maturity of cybersecurity awareness programs to protect your online presence is critical.
Ways To Increase The Maturity Of Cybersecurity Awareness Programs:
Here are ways you can adopt to ensure that your cybersecurity awareness programs are matured enough to tackle any possible attack.
Test Your Employees
Aside from simply distributing training materials and expecting employees to memorize the content, it is also critical to learn by doing. Furthermore, businesses should evaluate their employees’ security knowledge regularly to ensure they grasp every cybersecurity lesson.
These tests can take numerous forms, from simple assessments following a training session to randomized imitation phishing emails to check if employees fall for them. Employee cybersecurity awareness evaluation strengthens lessons acquired in formal training sessions. It is also crucial in identifying security knowledge gaps. For example, if over half of all employees fall for the same trick, a knowledge gap must be addressed.
Be Updated On Major Cybersecurity Attacks
Another technique for increasing cyber risk awareness at your company is to highlight significant cybersecurity events worldwide as they occur. Unfortunately, it won’t be long before there are multiple examples to share as data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other infiltrations continue to happen.
Mention these cybersecurity incidents and their underlying causes at team meetings. It will be an effective way to increase the maturity of cybersecurity awareness programs within your employees. Moreover, it also helps persuade employees that following cybersecurity best practices is a good idea. But, on the other hand, it emphasizes how poor cybersecurity practices can hurt the organization as a whole.
Document Your Cybersecurity Program
Administering your cybersecurity plans through a project management approach is an effective way to ensure that it stays on track and benefits all parties involved. First, make a strategy outlining the goals and connect them to particular tasks and activities. Then, create a schedule for when to generate and disseminate materials and milestones in following best practices.
You can begin tracking developments and compare them to planned outcomes as your program grows. These procedures may appear overwhelming at first, particularly if you don’t have any background working in the technical trenches. However, if you take the time to plan everything out once a year, you’ll have a transparent strategy and will give you direction.
Improve Your Cybersecurity Defenses
Even if your business is constantly investing in cybersecurity solutions, this does not mean that all potential security weaknesses are dealt with and addressed. With cybersecurity software costs rising and budgets shrinking, enterprises must adopt a risk-based approach and prioritize defense improvement. That will address major concerns and threats as your business move forward. Rather than constantly seeking cutting-edge technology, invest in practices that will help increase the maturity of cybersecurity awareness programs and procedures.
Always Conduct Cybersecurity Training
Developing a formal cybersecurity training program is one of the most direct ways to improve cybersecurity awareness in any organization. Awareness is not a significant concern for any company that has a thorough cybersecurity training program in place. It mitigates risks as employees have knowledge on what they should and should not do should a breach happen.
Launching a cybersecurity training program helps fortify one of the most vulnerable network security vulnerabilities in any organization, your employees. You may also want to note that insider threats are routinely ranking high on top cyber threat lists. That is because employees may unintentionally fall victim to phishing or other social engineering assaults. Always conduct security awareness training to make your defenses stand firm on the ground.
Try Automation
Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate cybersecurity processes. Automate practices like detecting potential threats, identifying unauthorized access, and preventing attacks before they occur. As a result, you can have automated cybersecurity solutions that will help evaluate security metrics. It can minimize incident response time and reduce the cyberattack footprint. Furthermore, automation frees up the security team’s time to concentrate on high-risk threats rather than minimal, time-consuming tasks.
Final Thoughts
Many businesses and organizations offer training programs to help employees improve their cybersecurity awareness. However, training alone may not be adequate to have your company enhance cybersecurity practices. It will be hard to deal with any cyber threats and attacks as well. Therefore, employees and management must participate in life-like cyber occurrences in addition to training programs. The maturity of cybersecurity awareness programs also includes adopting a risk-based approach, documentation, and automation of practices. Cyberattacks are a constant battle, so there should be no room to be complacency in all of your cybersecurity defenses. Otherwise, you are posing a risk to your employees, customers, and business as a whole.
References:
- https://www.isaca.org/resources/isaca-journal/issues/2019/volume-2/how-to-increase-cybersecurity-awareness
- https://blog.rsisecurity.com/does-your-company-need-cyber-maturity-assessment/
