While cybersecurity awareness is the first step, employees must willingly embrace and proactively use cyber-secure practices both professionally and personally for it to truly be effective. This is known as a culture of security or security culture. Security culture is defined as an organisation’s collective awareness, attitudes, and behaviours toward security. Various studies have shown that organisations with strong cybersecurity cultures experience increased visibility into potential threats, reduced cyber incidents and greater post-attack resilience, among other measurable benefits.

We can all learn from organisations that have heavily invested in building cultures of safety to drive down workplace incident rates. When organisations saw that safety incidents, similar to security incidents, were costly and dangerous, they invested in preventing them with employee education. For this to be effective, they had to go beyond awareness to ensure employees were embracing safety protocols as part of their workplace culture. Just like you wouldn’t enter a construction site without a hard hat today building a security culture will make common mistakes like reusing passwords or opening malicious files a thing of the past.

For security culture to be most effective, it’s important to make security training not only engaging but also relevant to employees so they understand how cybersecurity impacts them in and outside of work especially with the increase in home/remote working. Like learning how to bend with your knees, security education can help them at home as well. With today’s hybrid workforce, this mindset is more important than ever. As leaders, it is our role to connect the dots and help employees understand how security education benefits them. When you get there, you can create lasting behaviour change and a culture of security.

For further info contact: Phil Pugh at Adept CTS T: 0191 341 0125 or E: philip@adeptcts.co.uk