You live your life immersed in security. You get it, and you have an enthusiasm for it.
This understanding extends to the vulnerabilities employees present as they go about their daily tasks. You know security awareness training is just as vital as any technical safeguard you could name.
Unfortunately, your enthusiasm for promoting security awareness within your organization isn’t matched by the executives signing the checks. To get them to not just consider security awareness, but to invest in it, you need to tie security goals with business goals, and be ready to answer common objections.
Do any of these sound familiar?
- We’ve never had a cybersecurity incident, so we don’t see the need for employee training.
- It will cost too much, we already spend enough on technical safeguards.
- Training can’t really change behavior, plenty of companies with trained employees have been breached, so training can’t work that well.
- Technology is enough to keep our data and systems secure, these keep us protected and better equipped than something geared toward our employees.
- We’re too small to justify a security awareness program, a hacker would never want to break into a company our size.
In our white paper, Overcoming 5 Objections to Security Awareness Training, we address these common objections we’ve heard to implementing security awareness training, explain why they’re wrong, and provide some fodder for responding to the ones making the decisions.
Take the first one for example: We don’t need training because we’ve never had a cybersecurity incident.
The Rationale
Our company has gone X amount of years without a data breach of any kind. We must be doing something right. I don’t see why we need something like security awareness training.
Why It’s Wrong
If you’ve never had your home broken into, it’s easy to be flippant about remembering to lock your doors at night or to turn on your alarm system. If you’ve never been in a car accident, you might be inclined to drive a little faster than you should down the highway.
And if you’ve never been the victim of a security breach, you may think intrusions only happen to other people, or much larger businesses. But in all these situations, your actions (or inactions) may put you at greater risk for something to happen in the future.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the number of data breaches, trends aren’t on your side (just flip through the pages of the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report). In the face of so many threats, your business must apply its due diligence to ensure that vulnerabilities are not left to fate. The human angle of these threats cannot be ignored.
Suggested Response
We’ve been lucky, it’s true, and here’s hoping our luck continues.
But no business decisions should rely so heavily on luck.
Industry research like the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report show that it’s not a matter of if a company experiences a data breach, it’s when.
In the face of so many threats, we must apply all due diligence to ensure that our vulnerabilities are not left to fate and the human side of cybersecurity is accounted for. Our reputation and revenue could be on the line.
Get More In the Full White Paper
Download this white paper to gather more in-depth information on how to respond to the other four objections to security awareness programs and learn how to provide guidance to the decision makers to show the return of investment of a security awareness program.
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