Data informs nearly every aspect of our day-to-day lives. We can measure steps walked in a day, money saved relative to our finance goals, and even our favorite team’s performance against peers.
When it comes to the people side of cybersecurity, however, there is a notable lack of performance data. This limited visibility creates knowledge gaps that can dramatically expose organizations operationally, reputationally, and financially.
Traditional cybersecurity training methods are falling short of cyber leaders’ needs. Webinars, tabletops, and annual courses don’t provide real-time visibility into individual and team performance. Even worse, they can create a false sense of cyber preparedness.
While 78% of cybersecurity leaders agree that their organization’s C-level executives are placing more pressure on the cybersecurity team than they did a few years ago, it’s time to look beyond traditional training methods to novel solutions that can truly prove cyber resilience.
Understand human cyber capabilities
The only real way to measure human cyber capability is by continuously exercising individuals and teams. Exercising must be applied across the entire organization, including crisis training for the board and tailored hands-on labs for all levels of stakeholders. By exposing the entire organization to realistic cyber scenarios, organizations can dramatically increase preparation for response to a real-world crisis.
Armed with insights from continuous exercising, organizations can gain the visibility necessary to identify gaps and strengths by comparing individual and team performance to industry frameworks and benchmarks. Extensive reporting at both the individual and team level enables cybersecurity leaders to identify and reduce specific organizational risks and vulnerabilities, such as gaps in coverage within the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
Measure progress using common, credible metrics
Through targeted exercising implemented at a regular cadence, organizations can not only show improvement around decision making, skill sets, and confidence in policies and procedures, but can also tangibly measure and benchmark individual and team progress.
Track both individual and team improvement using a combination of crisis and technical team simulations and individual training labs to gain visibility into performance. With these metrics, organizations can measure capabilities against internal and industry baselines to document progress against goals.
Modernize your approach to build and proving cyber resilience
Legacy cybersecurity training methods simply aren’t worth the cost. Accompanied by hefty price tags, traditional checked-box training equips users with information that quickly becomes irrelevant. Given the speed of the emerging threat landscape, organizations need training that is reflective of current and emerging threats – not reliance on skills that were a must twelve months ago.
By reducing reliance on outdated training methods and shifting to more modern approaches to upskilling teams, organizations can increase visibility into cybersecurity performance across the organization. Equipped with real-time metrics, cyber leaders can definitively quantify cyber capabilities, confidently answering the question: “Is our team prepared for the next cyber attack?”
To learn more about how Immersive Labs help organizations definitively prove cyber resilience, click here.
