When implementing a cybersecurity program for your employees there’s three things that you need to worry about.
3 Crucial Elements for a Successful Cybersecurity Awareness Program
1. What is your policy?
One is, what is your policy? What are you actually going to implement in your cybersecurity awareness program? Take your goals and work backwards from there – askings questions like the following:
- How are we going to keep our employees safe?
- How are we going to make sure that they’re up to date on changes in the policy?
- Who maintains the policy?
- Are you allowed to use Wi-Fi in public places?
- Can you use your own device are you allowed to use things like Dropbox and Google Drive that’s synced to your own devices?
These are areas you want to worry about in creating your policy and then work backwards from there on how to best and most effectively implement.
2. What is expected of employees?
Second is making sure that everybody understands what is expected of them. You’re going do this with your training. Tell them what they need to know and then you’re going to verify that they need to know it. Ask them questions that go from the policy and make sure that they know the right answers.
3. How do you validate employee engagement?
Last is validation. We need to make sure that people are paying attention and put them to the test, and this is an ongoing thing. Things like fake phishing emails. Send them emails, see if they open it. Did they pay attention to the training? Do they care about the policy? This is what’s going to verify it. Pop in and do some surprise inspections. Are employees locking their computer when they walk away from their desk? Are they sending emails to their personally email account? These are things that we need to
constantly be worrying about.
Developing a Successful Cybersecurity Program
If you do these three things, 1) Plan 2) Train and 3) Validate, you’re going to have a successful cybersecurity program.
Read more on how to Develop Information Security Training for Employees