Covid-19 has forced businesses around the world into remote working, halting cybersecurity training and challenging the way it occurs. Amid the crisis, are your security experts sharpening their skills or letting them wane? If the latter, when will they resume training? Do your non-technical employees have the nous to work securely from home? These are issues facing every business, and neglecting them could have far-reaching consequences. The good news, however, is that you don’t have to watch as your security posture erodes. You can develop human cyber capability during lockdown and beyond with Immersive Labs, the browser-based solution unaffected by social distancing.
The rigidity of traditional training courses means most providers are now scrambling to get their material online. This is a slow-moving process, and the content that’s uploaded will be every bit as dry as it was before – click, click, finish. PowerPoint presentations were never fit for the curious minds that excel in cyber, and it’s high time organizations left classroom-based training behind. To unlock their potential, your people need to get hands on with emerging tools and techniques while facing realistic challenges. And right now there’s no better way to do this than Immersive Labs.
Global enterprises are already using our platform to equip their security teams and measure their effectiveness. With gamified, interactive content that’s available 24/7, your employees don’t have to wait for that dreaded training course to be rearranged; they can start learning at their own pace from the safety of home. Attackers are already looking to leverage the crisis and have recently ramped up their phishing campaigns, so it is not the time to put your security team on ice – it’s time to get them ahead of the game.
If not for current circumstances, businesses would still be trying to ready their security teams in gloomy hotel rooms. They would move only at the pace of the slowest learner and, once finished, their access to the course material would be revoked. It might sound dystopian, but this is the reality of legacy training methods – humans didn’t have cybersecurity in mind when they began arranging desks in rows all those years ago.
As a technical subject, cybersecurity is best taught through facilitation, not instruction. Our Chief Cyber Officer Max Vetter discovered the power of self-guided learning in India in 2014, when Sugata Mitra, winner of the 2013 TED Prize, introduced him to self-organized learning environments (SOLEs). Mitra embedded a computer in a wall of a Delhi slum in 1999, and local children were so keen to play with it that they taught themselves English to better understand it. Mitra, through two decades of research, found that children can teach themselves anything when given the correct tools; not only teach themselves, in fact, but learn faster and more comprehensively than they would in a classroom setting. We know that the same applies to cybersecurity training.
You can watch Sugata Mitra’s winning TED talk here:
If you want to learn how you can develop human cyber capability at the speed of cyber, and leave the classroom behind for good, download the Ultimate Cyber Skills Strategy Cheat Sheet to today.
