The Importance of Effective Cybersecurity Awareness Program

Measuring the security awareness training effectiveness correctly is essential for an organization.

FREMONT, CA: A lack of measurement is one of the major culprits of why organizations fail on their security front. Measuring and reporting team member behavior after a cybersecurity training is complex to quantify since they have to rate the effectiveness of the security awareness training and leave a parameter showing that employees are continually enhancing their cyber hygiene. The measurement needs are broad, and without consistent, accurate measurement, how can firms see an increase in performance? Here is a few methods that firms can utilize to measure their security awareness training effectiveness correctly.

The first step that all well-planned cybersecurity programs must implement is strategy. Without it, the good intentions of cybersecurity awareness training may perform into the potential pitfall of it becoming a wasted initiative. Before firms think about measuring the success of training, their time and effort would be best placed into what they want to achieve and how they want to achieve it. An excellent methodology could be to deploy a clean desk policy. This can mean keeping stock of how many employees leave their systems without password protection, who forgot to shred documents before trashing them. Firms can even take it towards the fun route, perhaps putting on posters around the office or incentivizing employees.

Firms can now take the most useful metrics they need to monitor. When it comes to measuring employees' awareness, people's knowledge and comprehension of security can be tracked through online security awareness training performance. It becomes a lot more seamless to see how much employees know about the best cybersecurity practices. These issues should be remedied on all company levels, from the organizational level to the individual level. For measuring behavior, the best route is through simulated cyber-attacks. Simulated attacks will test the security behaviors of the people in the firm. They are monitoring how people respond to these attacks gives firms a metric for security behavior. Another way to quantify behavior can indicate a behavioral shift, like measuring triggers as two key components.