Turn your workforce into your greatest cybersecurity asset

Introduction

Cybersecurity is a compliance and reputational risk in every industry and in every organization. Information security is one of the most important and challenging issues facing businesses of all sizes. As organizations are exposed to threats, cultivating a culture of cybersecurity should be one of your highest priorities. Having a strong cybersecurity culture will protect your business against cyber threats and data breaches.

As many continue to work remotely, companies need to consider a more comprehensive approach to ensure that employees adopt the right behaviors. Leaders need to go beyond raising awareness and focus on changing behavior through a cybersecurity culture. Many organizations focus on technology, but your employees should be your first line of defense. Organizations with a strong cybersecurity culture consistently show greater attention to their employees. What is a cybersecurity culture? Cybersecurity culture is an organization’s collective awareness, attitudes, and behaviors toward cybersecurity. A strong cybersecurity culture is based on employees willingly embracing and proactively using cybersecurity practices.

Six Tips

The best way to mitigate cyber risk is to develop, monitor, and build a strong cybersecurity culture that encourages employees to practice good cybersecurity habits. Below are six (6) tips to establish a robust cybersecurity culture:

1. Identify Champions
   As cybersecurity becomes more of a business operations concern, security champions play an increasingly important role in establishing an organization’s security culture. Their roles range from training their co-workers to assisting with security audits to threat reporting. By choosing good security champions to provide a link between all facets of the organization and the security team, you add another layer of protection for your network and data.
2. Instill That Security Belongs to Everyone
   Your employees may have the opinion that the IT department or staff is responsible for security. Security is not just an IT department problem, but an issue which involves everyone. A security culture requires that everyone be all in. Employees are the greatest vulnerability and must contribute to the security posture of your organization.
3. Reward Secure Behavior
   Reward and recognize those people that do the right thing for security. Look for opportunities to celebrate success. It has been proven that rewarding good behavior works much better than punishing mistakes. Security departments tend to get a bad reputation for being organizations that punish people for bad behavior. Rewarding people for doing the right behaviors gets them to be more security conscious while creating a better reputation for the Security department.
4. Make Training Fun & Engaging
   Cybersecurity training should not be a one-and-done exercise in compliance. To gain a deeper buy-in, provide brief and frequent training based on real experiences. Cybersecurity training should be designed to meet employees where they are and how they learn best. Give people training that looks and feels like the content they consume – interactive, bite-sized, dynamic, video-based, personalized, and high-quality.
5. Document Security Policies
   Security policy is critical to security culture because it guides employee behavior. Ensure your business has the right security measures in place by creating and implementing a cybersecurity policy. A company cybersecurity policy helps clearly outline the guidelines for transferring company data, accessing private systems, and using company-issued devices.
6. Encourage People to Report Incidents
   To nurture security responsibility, encourage everyone to report not only major incidents but also suspicious activity. Your employees must be dedicated to reporting on cyber incidents (or potential ones), phishing, malware, and other vulnerabilities. Without reporting, you simply do not know much of what is going on.

Summary

Organizations that do not develop a security-oriented corporate culture are risking fraud, loss or misuse of data, and legal responsibility when information is compromised. Even the most sophisticated security technologies will be only as effective as the people who make use of them, and to rally employees to make their best efforts requires a strong culture of cybersecurity. Investing in your people is a vital step to creating a strong culture of security. But even the most cyber-aware employees will make mistakes. To provide a reliable safety net, your cybersecurity infrastructure needs to be equally strong. A partner of leading cybersecurity solutions, CentraComm can help you assess whether your culture and security technology align.