As security professionals, we understand the importance of performing security assessments and penetration tests against our IT infrastructures. The information gained from assessments allows us to create a plan to mitigate the identified risks. However, many companies never think about performing assessments against their employees, which can extrapolate the organization’s risk.
Assessments are an excellent way to expose security vulnerabilities, helping to identify individuals and departments that are missing critical security steps to safeguard your organization. Likewise, assessments can track how knowledge gaps are reduced over time with appropriate security awareness training. They can show the return on investment for your security program and just how much it’s paying off.
Gaining baseline data
Organizations can use assessments before training is delivered as a pre-assessment to report on the current performance level of an organization and determine the right training program to respond to its unique needs. Identifying where the knowledge gaps are within the company is critical to running a successful security awareness program. Wouldn’t it be an eye-opener if an assessment identified your finance department as your lowest scoring department, making it the most significant risk to the organization? The potential ramifications are staggering. Those untrained employees could cause a business email compromise (BEC) or CEO fraud. Many companies that have experienced these types of attacks suffer crushing financial losses. Understanding that a specific employee group needs training from a baseline assessment is vital to mitigate these risks.
Assessments can also be used at periodic intervals in an awareness program to see how training affects knowledge and at the end of a program cycle to show an increase in knowledge of fundamental security best practices.
Assessments provide an end-to-end solution for security awareness training, monitoring and supporting positive employee behavior change.
Assessments to guide training
The ultimate value of security awareness assessments is gaining insight into where your weakest links reside, so you can customize your security awareness program to start targeting your simulated phishing campaigns, remedial and general awareness training. Your security awareness company will look at the assessment results and prescribe a targeted training program based on those identified needs. You can also increase the amount and type of phishing simulations you send to that particular user group based on assessment outcomes.
Assessments are vital to examine the progress and success of your security awareness program. Once you have baseline assessment data, you should roll out another evaluation to see how your employees have improved each year.
Security assessments from Global Learning Systems
GLS offers completely customizable security assessments, utilizing our robust SecureGenius™ assessment tool. Many benefits highlight the value of security awareness assessments from GLS, including:
- More acute awareness of mitigating enterprise risk. Risk management is one of the primary goals of IT and information security skills assessment. Technological and regulatory risk changes so much in just a year. Since SecureGenius assesses and trains your employees multiple times throughout the year, we educate your best and brightest to stay one step ahead of hackers.
- Efficient and tailored education solution for employees of all skills levels. When setting up training programs in-house or using a “pre-packaged” outsourced training module, it may be too prefabricated for all of your employees’ skills levels and needs. With SecureGenius’ on-demand library, you can customize your training program based on skills gaps or other criteria.
- Our experts can design a training plan for you after assessing your staff. You may be unsure what a security assessment should contain and what type of assessment is best for your organization. We create and manage the plan for you so that you and your management team can focus on running and growing your organization. Whether you need a general user or role-based training, our instructional design team can create a custom SecureGenius plan at any stage of the training cycle that best fits your organization’s needs.
- SecureGenius isn’t just a test. Once employees complete an assessment, they can immediately view the results and get links for related educational content in areas on which they tested poorly. They will receive a visual cue to do this right away, allowing your employees to follow up on addressing these skills gaps immediately.
- SecureGenius works at any point in the training cycle. SecureGenius assessments can be done before training to determine security awareness knowledge and enabled tailored programming for your organization’s needs. Our assessments can also be performed throughout the training program to gauge skills gaps and how they are affecting your staff’s knowledge and awareness. SecureGenius assessments can also be a “final exam” at the end of the training cycle to demonstrate that your team has increased it knowledge in security best practices.
Understanding the value of security awareness assessments is critical to any security awareness training program’s implementation and success. Remember, security awareness is a journey and not a destination.
For more information about SecureGenius™ assessments and training from Global Learning Systems, contact us today.
