Most of us have some form of remote workforce now due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In order to keep this remote workforce secure, it is extremely important to make security a part of your organizational culture. Below you will find the 5 key steps that you should take in order to create a strong culture of security within your business:
1. Security culture needs to be embedded in your culture like with the values of your organization's leadership
Building a successful culture of security must start at the top. You may be thinking, "I thought it was IT's job to educate and engage with employees who break security policies?". Just like any other organizational value, it would be very difficult for IT to function without the help of leadership embodying the values you need to maintain a secure business.
Leadership can help play a positive role in fostering a culture of security by investing in security teams. They can also do this by setting the expectation among staff that security is taken very seriously. It's also very important that business leaders and security leaders have a common language. The language that many executives and security teams have found is that of business risk assessment and security performance benchmarking.
Business risk assessment recognizes security as both a business risk and an opportunity. Boards need to appreciate the impact that cyber security can have on a business and treat it as a top business risk as well as a top business opportunity. An effective way to do this is by offering a short and dedicated security training for your board members to understand some of the more difficult security concepts.
Security performance benchmarking helps make your overall job much less stressful. Providing industry-wide benchmarking data could play a critical role in helping IT security teams better understand whether they are putting the best practices into place. Therefore, giving you the best possible cyber security for your business.
2. You must make your employees aware of the importance of security to your organization and how it impacts their own work
Even if your organization already has training and documentation in place that discusses this, it is still a good idea to reiterate this significance to your employees. This can be done through company wide communications channels and remote events. This is more prevalent now that many employees are adopting new technologies in order to work remotely. If they are not properly trained, these new technologies can set them up for new and emerging types of malware. Your ultimate goal while you educate your employees is to remind them that not only is security critical to the health of the organization, but security risks they face effectively translate to job performance. An employee affected by a security incident cannot perform their duties, the importance of this is why they need to broadly grasp the different types of security threats their organization might face.
3. Tie personal learning into your employee's security education
Highlight to your employees that security education will make them good digital citizens. Having those skills will help them in their personal life as well as in future roles. As often as you can show your employees how these lessons can apply to both on and off the job to keep engagement and encourage them to actually use these best practices.
4. Encourage your employees to apply what they have learned
Building and updating your security education program is only half of the work. Next you need to get your employees to apply what they have learned. The ultimate goal is to get them to identify and potentially spot future incidents. One way to do this is by pairing your education programs with period simulations such as phishing tests. This will give employees the ability to demonstrate what they have learned.
5. Build a resource library focused on security
Documentation for employees to look back on is just as important as training and awareness programs. By having these documents it shows just how important the security is. A security resource library should include company security policies, descriptions of cyber risks, as well as content from previous security trainings such as videos or other interactive content. Make sure to encourage your employees to review the resource library periodically so they can always stay up to date.
Join us for a live webinar and learn the top 5 things you can do to prevent a data breach or watch our info-video on how to spot a phishing attack.
If you have any questions about how you can build a culture of security for your employees, reach out to us at info@rcsprofessional.com
*https://nightfall.ai/resources/culture-of-security-remote-work/