Organizations are wasting their money on cybersecurity training. This may be a surprising statement, given that Immersive Labs has a world-class ability to improve the cybersecurity capabilities and decision-making of cyber professionals, executives, and other non-technical employees. But legacy training is a “feel good” activity that does nothing to measurably improve real-world cyber resilience. Training provides activities. Immersive Labs provides outcomes. The word “training” itself establishes a mindset that is fundamentally at odds with our mission to fix the way organizations assess, build, and prove cyber readiness and resilience.

It is our fundamental belief that activity without measurement is the wrong approach to virtually everything worth doing. That is why assessing and proving cybersecurity capabilities is at the heart of everything we do at Immersive Labs. It is our raison d’etre to change the way the world approaches the “people” element of cybersecurity. Organizations must stop thinking about training, certifications, and learning as “check the box” activities without tangible results. It’s time to build and measure cyber capabilities.

The cybersecurity capabilities of an organization’s workforce are critical to reducing risk and they deserve as rigorous an approach to evaluation and testing as other areas that are more traditionally considered technical disciplines. This is a foundational mistake that legacy cybersecurity training companies have been making for years – to the detriment of their customers. Many CISOs and security leaders are stuck focusing on what percentage of their organization has completed required training when they need to be thinking about the real-world strengths and weaknesses of their team and how to invest in order to most effectively and efficiently close the gaps.

All cybersecurity programs must address risk across people, processes, and technology at their own organizations and across their supply chain. On the technical side, the market is flooded with tools. Every day, security teams receive floods of unprioritized alerts for potential vulnerabilities across cloud infrastructures, applications, and other systems. Organizations have processes for managing breaches and other crises. But the human element of cybersecurity is given short-shrift. People must ultimately make cybersecurity decisions that affect the risk of the organization. Ensuring – and proving – that people have the skills to make the right decisions is no longer optional – it’s imperative.

A New Approach to Cybersecurity

In order to solve these challenges and help our customers achieve provable resilience, we need to shift our thinking about how to approach cybersecurity:

  • It’s about People. People can be your biggest liability or your best asset. All the latest technology won’t help if your people and teams don’t have the right capabilities or make the right decisions.
  • Defense is a Team Sport. No single cyber professional can stop an attack, but at the same time, teamwork doesn’t happen naturally. It requires deliberate practice. There are many examples in the sports world where winning teams do not always have the most individual talent but are the teams that work together the best.
  • Learning Isn’t for Spectators. People and teams improve by doing, not watching videos or reading documents. Only by being pushed to the limit in realistic scenarios are people prepared for real-world crises.
  • Individual and Team Capabilities are Measurable and Provable. Finally, measurement and evidence are not only for technical controls. You need the data to be confident that your teams will successfully respond to a cyber incident or crisis. Organizations should prove cyber resilience to their Board, auditors, and other third parties.

Cyber Workforce Resilience is Outcome-Based

Immersive Labs is solving the world’s cybersecurity “People” problem by pioneering an entirely new approach to measuring, building, and proving cyber readiness in order to effectively respond to the latest cyber threats. We call this Cyber Workforce Resilience. It includes four steps to help you evaluate, up-level, and prove cybersecurity skills while maintaining a continuous focus on outcomes:

Ultimately, we provide quantifiable results for our customers. In the past 18 months, we have helped well over 2,000 organizations run over 500,000 cyber exercises. But volume and activity are not – and never have been – how we track success.

If you’re looking for cybersecurity training so that you can “check the box”, we may not be the right partner for you. If you want to have a measurable impact on the cybersecurity readiness of your organization in order to reduce risk and prove resilience, we are here to work with you hand-in-hand to help you achieve your goals.

Click here to download a Forrester report about why it’s time to rethink your reliance on cybersecurity certifications.

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Published

March 2, 2023

WRITTEN BY

Russell Miller

Vice President of Product Marketing, Immersive Labs