5 Benefits of Empowering Your Team with Security Awareness Training

5 Benefits of Empowering Your Team with Security Awareness Training

Asset protection and cybersecurity are important in today’s world. As more essential data and valuable information is stored digitally, the main threats to a company’s security and profitability are digital. Though your organization may go to great lengths to enhance cybersecurity, firewalls, and other network protections to defend valuable client data, financial information, and proprietary assets, most businesses will find that there’s one glaring weakness in their security- people. While you trust your team to get the job done right for you, sometimes they unwittingly can play right into cyber criminals’ hands. It is absolutely essential to educate and empower your employees to recognize and prevent threats. As the end-users of your network, they are your first line of defense and comprehensive security awareness training for your personnel could benefit your cybersecurity infrastructure massively.

Your team wants to do their jobs well. You have a responsibility to train your employees so that they have the tools to do the job required of them. If you are neglecting essential security awareness training in your organization, you may be denying them a vital tool to protect company assets and interests. Below, we’ll discuss five benefits you can expect to see from incorporating security awareness training into your company culture.

1. A more empowered and confident staff

As the technology used in workplaces has expanded in recent years, many employees are now using far more technology at work than they do in their personal lives. While this can make a great blank slate to apply training to, but without proper training, your team’s confidence and productivity can waver. If your staff is self-teaching themselves many of the aspects of the technology they use on a daily basis, this may cause more utilization of IT professionals for nonessential tasks and collaboration with peers on tasks that should be easily doable by a single employee. Your other employees are slowly and inefficiently being used to train employees behind the curve.

With under-trained employees, a lack of understanding may create a productivity disaster after a breach. Employees that don’t understand security protocol or how breaches work may find themselves cautious and less productive after hearing about a breach. Demystifying cybersecurity for your team can limit these effects and increase productivity and employee comfort.

2. Saves money

Data breaches can be incredibly expensive. As IBM found that 95% of security breaches begin as human error, you can mitigate the risk of breaches by maintaining excellent security awareness education for your employees. While security awareness training does have a cost to implement, just like other training programs the benefit far outweighs the cost. Breaches can be so costly that even preventing one single breach could save your business money even after years of paying to administer security awareness training.

3. Saves time

If time is money, then this perk of security awareness training is doubly beneficial. Security breaches can be costly monetarily, but also have a huge cost in time lost. Time spent fixing and repairing a breach and altering security methods to prevent it from recurring is a huge endeavor that will monopolize a large chunk of your team for a significant time. Preventing breaches saves time and keeps your team working on what you need them working on.

4. Improved security

Due to the importance of protecting data and digital assets, many companies spend a massive amount on cybersecurity. As most breaches result from human error, all of this effort and expenditure means little if your personnel isn’t educated enough in security protocols to be trusted to prevent breaches. Even the most sophisticated security infrastructures can easily be compromised by a single employee falling for a simple phishing scheme, which according to a 2019 Verizon study made up 32% of all breaches.

Though your security measures can protect against sophisticated attacks and minimize damage in case of a breach, an employee falling for a single phishing attempt can give cybercriminals a foothold in your network to exploit. If your employees aren’t sufficiently educated to spot and prevent these attempts, you’ve left your biggest vulnerability entirely unfortified.

5. Employee culture

Confident employees are efficient and productive employees. If your employees are not receiving any kind of security awareness training, it’s likely that many are not operating confidently in digital spaces. You need them to be sure of how to do their jobs and not constantly worry about making missteps. Providing necessary training can make your team more comfortable in their roles, and more confident that they won’t make accidental mistakes.

Regular and comprehensive security awareness training can have a macro benefit on the culture of an entire workplace though when the results of increased training are viewed at the organizational level. Incorporating security awareness training into your culture can create a more open culture where employees talk about security issues and communicate with each other and supervisors more regularly and clearly. By opening a dialogue about security, your training program can yield exponential results as the principle of digital security becomes part of daily life in your organization.

A necessary step to responsible security

With increasingly more digital commerce and vital data stored on secure networks every year, maintaining a top-notch cybersecurity environment is more essential than ever. If you want to prevent breaches and the costs and hassles associated with them consistently, you simply can’t neglect security awareness training. You trust your employees with your organization’s fate, why not provide them with all the tools to ensure that your organization remains protected from threats.

If you are interested in empowering your employees to protect digital assets with security awareness training, contact us today. We take security seriously, and the first step in that is providing your team with the tools to protect their work and your business’s assets.