In this age, contrary to normal expectations, cybersecurity threats have become more and more complicated. Your business needs to invest in advanced software applications and technologies. This was effective a decade ago but is not enough in the current scenario.

You will also have to develop a strong security culture where all the users know about the potential risks and the steps they can take to address them. Since implementing a strong security culture can be something of a new experience for many businesses, it is important to know how it will make an impact. Assessing your existing culture and exploring opportunities for making changes is also required. So, what exactly does a successful security culture consist of, and how can you develop one? This guide helps you find answers to these questions.

Importance of a Security Culture

Today, cybersecurity is a critical area of concern for almost all businesses. You cannot afford to ignore cybersecurity under any circumstances, given that during the first 6 months of 2022, the world witnessed over 236 million ransomware attacks. Most often, regarding employees, statistics are not convincing enough to make an impact. This is where creating a security culture can help make an impact.

Security culture refers to the collective cybersecurity awareness among a company’s
employees. A healthy security culture gets everyone within an organization working together to keep sensitive data and assets safe. In such a culture, security is treated as a shared responsibility and is not just seen as the concern of the IT security team.

Laying the Foundation for a Strong Security Culture

The first and most important step is creating a clear set of protocols and procedures and communicating them to all the employees. Examples of such policies include rules that entirely prevent the use of personal devices for accessing work-related data. Another example is not storing any business-related data on personal cloud accounts.

Assess Your Company’s Security Culture

Before developing a strong security culture, it is important to identify the lapses, shortcomings, and gaps in your current security policies.

It will be required to take the following steps to make the assessment:

• Take Stock of Your Assets: It is important to take stock of your assets that need protection. This includes the software applications, documents, and other data important for your business operation. It is these data sets that potential cyber attackers will target.
• Assess Current Security Protocols: Evaluate the current security policies in place. Determine whether access to sensitive directories is protected by access control and elaborate user permissions or not. Assess the information that is stored in the public cloud and whether you can move it to a private cloud to boost security. Explore all opportunities for improving security.
• Identify All Key Threats: Determine the most likely IT security threats to your
  organization. This includes the types of threats specific to your industry or niche. Further, you should also conduct worst-case scenario assessments.

Consider scenarios where one or more employees become victims of phishing attacks. Consider the damage level that could occur if someone gets access to the internal network.

Finding answers to these questions should help you plan better to develop a more
comprehensive security culture. Such an assessment should also clarify what is at stake in case of a cybersecurity attack.

Additional Strategies

There is no limitation to how many steps you can take to create a more elaborate security culture. Some of the additional steps you can take are as follows:

• Communicate the Risks of Poor Security Awareness: Your employees must clearly communicate the risks associated with poor security awareness. Employees must have a clear understanding of the likely results of any lapses. Some of the consequences include legal liability, financial loss, damage to brand name and reputation, and identity theft.
• Provide Security Training: It is best to provide cybersecurity training and education as part of the onboarding process. This can help, for example, by enabling your employees to identify phishing emails and take the right steps if and when they receive them in their inboxes. This step is important, considering that 95% of cybersecurity attacks in business are related to human error.
• Provide Ongoing Training: Cybersecurity training should not be a one-time affair. Your employees should receive ongoing training on the latest cybersecurity threats and how to tackle them. Make cybersecurity a part of their regular work routine.
• Create a Human-Centric Security Process: It is not enough to force your employees to use specific cybersecurity tools or follow the rules. Proper explanations can help motivate your people to embrace the policies and build proper security habits. The key is to follow a human-centered approach to security culture implementation. This involves listening to your employees’ concerns, getting feedback, and using the insights to improve the implementation.

If you want to make the most of a security culture, it is important to make everyone realize it is everyone’s responsibility. As you can see above, this will require getting everyone involved from the moment they join your organization. Continual security training is also an important factor. It is further important to make every employee realize how important their contribution is to creating such a culture.

In summary, you should create clear security protocols and processes and incentivize positive security practices. Making an investment in a strong security culture is important to keep your organization and assets safe.

 

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