Technology-based solutions are essential for your business. These solutions include things like: firewalls, endpoint detection and response solutions, secure email gateways, desktop anti-virus, cloud-based malware and spam filtering. However, too many decision makers forget about the most important preventative measure: the human beings who interface with their networks, data, and financial resources.

Security awareness training is designed to bolster users’ ability to recognize threats like phishing attempts, unusual requests, malicious advertising on web pages, and many other threats designed to trick users.

Users who are trained on security issues will be more skeptical and more careful about opening emails, clicking on social media links, or visiting web pages without first checking for clues about their validity.

It is also important to note that a security awareness training program is not just about avoiding security problems, but avoiding the significant losses that can result in the absence of training.

Recent Trends You Should Follow

Increasing security budgets:
Security budgets at most organizations are increasing over time. Interestingly, at many organizations a relatively small portion of the total security budget is spent on anti-phishing technologies, despite the fact that phishing is regarded as the leading overall concern, and many other concerns are the direct result of phishing.

Security awareness training budgets are increasing even faster:
On a per-employee and per-email-user basis, security awareness budgets are growing at a significantly faster pace than overall security budgets. The growth in these budgets coincides with a significant increase in the monthly minutes of security awareness training that users receive.

Training dramatically improves users’ ability to recognize threats:
Before security awareness training, IT and security have relatively little confidence in their users’ ability to recognize various types of threats. However, after users have received training, the level of confidence in their knowledge and ability to avoid threats jumps dramatically.