What are the benefits of a security awareness training program for employees?

Security awareness training package for employees, help the staff to have understand the importance of security for the individual, organization and the host environment, it help the employees to identify threat situation and a threat, it also reduces risk and vulnerability in the organization, it reduces security incidents, and cost of implementation of security controls, it also builds security confidence in the workforce knowing that their environment is safe and secures, and further increase productivity for profitability.

Security awareness training can be developed in-house by your IT Security Department or Risk Management team, or it can be delivered by a third party vendor.

Security Awareness trainings helps developers and other employees the importance of security in applications. I always quote "It takes 20 years to build trust but it takes 20 minutes to lose it" to put emphasis on security in applications. These training programs helps employees to understand various vulnerabilities that can arise in a software application, various attacks that can be performed, and various safeguards to preven them. I believe Simulations are best way to raise this awareness. There are multiple programs online like Secure Code Warriror which is specific to Software developer to learn Secure Coding.

A clueless user can defeat a million dollar security tool. Your security solution could have some of the strongest controls imaginable. But if your staff isn't trained, no amount of security will stop an otherwise well-meaning user from opening up your network for a persuasive criminal.

An indirect benefit of security awareness training is also organizational awareness training. You might be surprised to learn that a large portion of your staff is totally unaware that you even *have* a security department, let alone security policies that they ought to be following. Your users may be encountering security threats regularly, and were simply never informed on how to report them.

Your security awareness training should be specific to your industry and ought to include a discussion of industry specific regulations. If you're an educational institution, your employees should understand the security implications of FERPA. For healthcare, HIPAA. For finance, GLBA.

Employees will grumble and probably resist the training. A lot of them will try to get out of it, or may insist that it is a waste of their time. Two things to keep in mind that you may want to bring up (as diplomatically as possible, of course): 1. Security is everybody's job, and that includes you, regardless of title. This is not "wasting your time" because it's the organization's time. You're being paid to do this! 2. Use of the organization's IT resources comes with an expectation that you will use them safely, and security training comes with that. Last, the users who are most resistant to the security training are usually the ones who need it the most.