Four Strategies to Build a Successful Cybersecurity Program

By creating a successful cybersecurity champions program, organizations will be able to nurture, promote as well as encourage the best security across the organization.

The number of cyber-attacks in recent years has dramatically increased. This has resulted in many organizations witnessing a significant loss in their revenue, resulting in damaging their reputation. While investing in the most advanced technologies to secure the infrastructure is essential, it is not enough. Organizations need to ingrain cybersecurity into their overall operations. They should take initiatives such as cybersecurity champions programs to nurture and encourage cybersecurity awareness within a business combining education with peer-to-peer collaboration. This will result in them embedding a culture of security understanding, support and positive behavior among their workforce.

With a cybersecurity champion, organizations can scale up their awareness-raising, personalized communications while increasing incident reporting. However, cybersecurity champions programs have immensely grown in popularity; and provided benefits that some organizations could incorporate into their cybersecurity awareness strategies. While they do have a considerable impact on the cybersecurity infrastructure, creating a successful cybersecurity champions program is not as straightforward as it seems. It needs various key elements to achieve its goals and avoid being a wasted investment. 

Also Read: Addressing Cyber-Fraud – Security and Anti-Fraud Teams Must Collaborate

Here are three strategies that organizations can incorporate to build a successful cybersecurity champions program:

• Thoroughly designing their security champions programs

Organizations that found their security champions program is not delivering desired results, often do not plan them properly. They take the further step to recruit and launch it and are not able to reap the desired results. Thus, organizations should keep it in mind before launching the security champions programs to make it tailored to their organization. They should understand that the right foundations such as objectives, incentives, and roles and critical to its success.

• Ask the leaders to endorse the program

Having support from the leadership influences the success of the security champions program. Therefore, CISOs should make sure that their counterparts across the organization know and understand the value of promoting security champions programs. After receiving encouragement from the top, employees are more likely to participate in these programs. 

Also Read: Instead of the old one for Safer Internet Day

• Increase diversity

Cybersecurity champions enable organizations to augment security messages at the team level while acting as the security conscience for their department. They are always on the lookout for identifying issues and vulnerabilities within the infrastructure. Hence, they must be excellent with their communication skills and are trained better to understand cybersecurity and not the other way around. Organizations must recruit champions who are influencers across the organization. 

CISOs should begin finding champions who show enthusiasm around discussing security topics, actively become a part of training and awareness and also the ones who have been through security incidents in the past.

• Maintain the equation of commitment requirements

Becoming a security champion requires taking charge of things outside of their day-to-day job. Hence, CISOs should determine the level of commitment employees need to have to participate in the program. They strive to maintain the right equation of commitment and output to secure the longevity of the program as well as engagement of their employees while ensuring that the training is appropriate for specific and attainable goals.