Why Cybersecurity Certifications Won’t Protect Your Enterprise from Attacks

Company growth is at an all-time high. There’s just one thing standing between your organization and the next-level success: cybersecurity. To go after top-tier clients, your company needs to get serious about fending off security breaches. 

Your first thought may be to try and update your cybersecurity certifications. NIST. CMMC. ISO 27001. HIPAA. It’s an alphabet soup of new requirements. As the CISO or security program leader for your organization, your fellow leaders are looking to you for clear guidance about what to do next. So while trying to update your certifications, you start your search to identify a security awareness training program you can customize to your company’s needs at the same time. You want to find a solution you can quickly roll out to all of your users so that you can check the box and get on with everything else that’s on your plate. 

But what if we told you that security awareness training was more than just a hurdle to overcome on the road to getting that next big certification? What if, instead, you viewed it as a critical investment in your people, one with the potential to empower and engage your employees and make your business more resilient than ever? 

Sound a touch hyperbolic? It’s not. Security isn’t just a compliance issue, it’s a culture issue. In this post, we’ll explore why security awareness training is essential to the health of your company and what you should look for in a program.

What you’ll learn:

  • What security awareness training is.
  • Why your company needs it (it’s not just for the certification).
  • Why it’s important to establish a security-oriented culture.
  • What you should look for in a security awareness training.
  • Why Living Security is the best option for transforming your employees into cybersecurity champions.

 

What Is Security Awareness Training?

Security awareness training is any program that mitigates the risk of an infosec breach by helping your end users develop good cyber hygiene, teaching them to recognize and respond appropriately to security threats, and helping them understand their role in keeping your company’s data secure. It’s a basic requirement of security standards and certifications like ISO 27001, CMMC, SOC 2 and HIPAA.  

Clients like HP, Northrop Grumman, Atlassian, Verizon and T-Mobile trust Living Security to help them build a culture of cybersecurity and prevent security breaches.

 

Why Do You Need Security Awareness Training?

The short version: most breaches aren’t a tech issue, they’re a people issue. More often than not, breaches happen not because of hackers exploiting vulnerabilities in software or hardware, but for much more basic reasons. For example, employees who reuse passwords, who fail to employ MFA, or who fall for phishing attacks create opportunities for cybercriminals. These days, it’s all too easy for threat actors to use vishing, email business compromise or ransomware to part a company from its proprietary data or its money. 

 

Why It’s Important to Establish a Culture of Security

Creating a culture of security is the most effective way to protect against a data breach. Since most breaches occur because of people, your people are also the solution. When you inoculate your end users by making them aware of common threats and how to avoid them, treat them as an asset instead of a liability, and actively involve them in keeping your networks and physical spaces secure, you’re on your way to establishing a thriving culture of security.

The sooner you establish these practices and values in your organization, the better off you’ll be. It’s far easier (not to mention less traumatic and expensive) to preemptively invest in your employees’ training than it is to try to recover once a breach has already occurred. 

 

What to Look For in Security Awareness Training

Common Security Issues to Focus On

At a minimum, any security awareness training program you choose should teach your employees about common security issues such as:

  • Passwords and password managers
  • Multi Factor Authentication (MFA)
  • Reporting suspicious activity
  • Malware and ransomware
  • Working from home (wfh)
  • Mobile security
  • Cloud security threats
  • Policy violations
  • Data classification
  • Data privacy
  • Phishing

Programming That’s Customized to Your Company’s Specific Needs

If a company advertises a turnkey, one-size-fits-all security training program, it’s probably a sign to look elsewhere. To be truly effective, your security awareness training should take into account your company’s specific needs and goals. That includes the size of your organization, your industry (and any requirements specific to it), where your company’s data resides, your workforce model (onsite, remote, hybrid), your goals for training (one-time or ongoing), and more. The best security training vendors offer high-touch programs that can be customized according to your needs and feature ongoing support to ensure that you’re hitting your security objectives. 

Empowering Content That Makes Learning Fun

There are a lot of security training programs out there that meet the bare minimum requirements. If you ask us, many of them are boring and pedantic. Some even use fear-based tactics to get their message across, which can potentially backfire. Security training is serious stuff, but nobody said it had to be painful (or scary). That’s where Living Security comes in.  

Living Security's narrative-driven series, like The Squad, make security awareness training fun and memorable.

 

Living Security Transforms Your Employees Into Your Biggest Cybersecurity Asset

What makes Living Security’s security awareness training so different from anything else on the market? Our human risk management solution that does more than meet compliance needs, it also truly changes behavior. That’s because we believe empowering people is the key to ending cybersecurity breaches, picking up where traditional training drops off. Our enterprise security awareness training transforms your employees into champions in the fight against cybercrime. 

Why your employees will love Living Security:

  • Our training centers around short, impactful videos that wouldn’t be out of place on your favorite subscription streaming service. 
  • The curriculum features gamification, immersive scenarios and Hollywood-level production values—no hokey corporate training videos here. 
  • The lessons are designed to be consumed in bite-sized chunks, an approach termed microlearning, which makes it easier for your employees to retain what they’ve learned. 
  • The content is genuinely fun—the story-based lessons, which can take the form of anything from an escape room experience or a reality makeover program to a thriller or a comedy, appeal to our love of narrative, another approach that’s been proven to boost learning

At the end of the day, security awareness training isn’t just a tedious to-do on the path to snagging that big certification; it’s an essential investment in the long-term growth of your company. If you’re on the path to becoming NIST, CMMC, ISO 27001, HIPAA, or SOC-2 certified or compliant, skip the check-the-box solutions and choose a cybersecurity partner that will help you create lasting culture change in your organization.


Leading government contractors trust Living Security for security awareness training that not only helps them get audit-ready, but actually addresses the cause of human risk and creates lasting behavior change. Want to learn more? Request a demo today.

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