When it comes to protecting your business and its data from cyberattacks, having a strong and permeating security culture where your employees make good cyber security decisions is just as important as having up-to-date security technology. In this post, we’ll give you the keys to creating a strong cyber security culture, which itself is a key to organisational success.

Honestly assess your current situation

While everyone wants to strengthen their cyber security culture, not many organisations are prepared to carry out an honest and thorough audit of their current cyber security practices and culture, or admit to the problems and risks that they are facing. Candidly assessing your current cyber security culture through a lens of ‘beliefs, behaviours and outcomes’ will help you discover the root of any existing failings, and allow you to implement changes and metrics that track progress.

Establish concrete cyber security standards

After honestly assessing your cyber security failings, you’ll be creating new policies and procedures to correct them. By strengthening your overall security culture, you’ll be able to produce a written document of the new cyber security standards that can be shared with everyone – from employees to management and even the board of your organisation. Writing down and defining these new acceptable behaviours and standards will make them accessible to everyone. After all, you are creating a concrete cyber security agenda which everyone must adhere to, rather than an abstract list of guidelines that people may just occasionally remember to follow.

Don’t skip the basics

Simply put, you can never neglect the importance of basic cyber security training for your employees. It’s safe to say that if you’re not training new hires on the absolute basics of protecting data, then you can’t assume they’ve ever been trained on them by previous employers either. While it might seem excessive, the foundation of a strong cyber security culture is built on basics such as a strong-password policy, two-factor authentication, software and system patches, and monitored access to certain software or database used by employees.

Promote security culture from the top down

To successfully strengthen their cyber security culture, business owners and management have to do more than just fund a security awareness programme and sit back hoping people will learn. To ensure that the lessons and culture are spread throughout the business, management will need to communicate their solidarity with new standards and practices to employees. Visibly promoting the security message at training sessions and other events will reinforce its importance, while lower-ranking management should actively promote the culture to their teams directly.

Make cyber security engaging and fun

It shouldn’t be a surprise to leaders that, for most employees, cyber security is associated with boring training and the chance to switch off. Creating an engaging and fun way to train your employees on cyber security is key to making sure the lessons stick with people and are applied across the company. A dull voice-over in a PowerPoint presentation is a fast-track to failure.

If you’re looking for cyber security services that’ll make your organisation more secure and protect your data, contact CodeBlue now and find out how we can help your business. Compared to other IT companies in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch, CodeBlue specialise in providing enterprise-level support to small and medium-sized businesses, and can also assist with IT support, data recovery and cloud computing services.

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