Let’s face it – cyber threats and attacks get increasingly sophisticated over time.
In fact, the average cost of a data breach for businesses was a staggering $4.88 million in 2024. This alarming statistic highlights the urgent need organizations worldwide have to optimize their security stack and take care of their team’s cyber preparedness.
That’s exactly where the cyber exercise platform proves to be extremely effective. It helps you assess the skills of your current team, point out the vulnerabilities, and overcome challenges to make your organization attack-proof from bad actors.
In this article, let’s have a deeper overview of this topic and see what are the ways that you can make the most use of the cyber exercise platform.
What Is the Cyber Exercise Platform?
As the name suggests, a cyber exercise platform is a solution that organizations use to improve their security posture. They achieve this by simulating hyperrealistic cyber-attacks through the platform to give their team a chance to experience real-life cyber challenges.
Cyber exercise platform helps trainees fully experience and understand how cyber incidents are detected and handled. Most commonly, these simulated incidents include phishing, ransomware attacks, data breaches, and more.
This kind of hands-on, practical approach helps organizations in various directions:
- Assess the current level of the team's skill set.
- Adjust attack scenarios to industry-specific cases.
- Gain practical experience in handling cyber challenges.
- Conduct tests and validate ideas to make further improvements.
In practice, there are different types of existing cybersecurity exercises that companies can use to achieve their cyber preparedness objectives. All of these training activities have their own goals and objectives, and they should be chosen according to the organization’s needs.
Why Is Cyber Exercise Platform Important?
There are lots of essential steps to take in order to improve your organization's overall cyber preparedness. Conducting realistic cyber exercises and giving your team members the opportunity to refine their skills can have a huge impact on this process.
It is important to keep in mind that, in the world of ever-evolving cyber threats and attacks, taking proper measures to avoid consequences is vital for organizations worldwide.
There are countless examples of successfully launched and executed cyber attacks being detrimental to an organization's overall well-being, leading to the loss of a company's sensitive information and finances.
That's why utilizing innovative and capable cyber exercise platforms is important – it ensures the safety of your organization's sensitive data and helps your team boost their cyber resilience.
Insights gained from cyber exercises will help you identify areas of improvement for your team, ensuring the investment put into organizing these exercises is worth it for everyone involved in the process.
Here are some of the key areas that successfully executed cyber exercises can help your team improve on:
- The efficiency of the incident resolution process.
- The average time it takes to respond to a cyber attack.
- Tools and techniques that the team uses to identify vulnerabilities.
5 Ways to Make the Most Out of the Cyber Exercise Platform
There are lots of avenues that cyber exercise platforms could be used for – testing your team’s cyber capabilities, assessing the readiness of new technologies, and optimizing costs for R&D, just to name a few.
Let’s have a look at these activities more thoroughly and see how to make the most use of the cyber exercise platform in the most efficient way possible:
Run Live Cybersecurity Exercises for Your Team
A proper cyber exercise platform prominently gives you an opportunity to run hyper-realistic cybersecurity exercises for your team where you can test your team member’s skills and abilities to fight against cyber threats and attacks.
This way, employees get familiar with common attack patterns and advance their skills in a collaborative and competitive environment.
Organizations get to replicate and reuse the training modules that these cyber exercises provide in their virtual environments. This way, testing and training sessions will have a close-to-none impact on the company’s existing networks.
Different types of exercises, such as Live Fire, Threat Hunting, and CTF, give every participant a chance to learn how to work together and improve their cybersecurity skills in specific scenarios.
Address Employee Skills Gap & Identify Vulnerabilities
Another important use of a cyber exercise platform is that it ensures a high level of reliability when it comes to enhancing your team’s security posture and skill set in the field of cybersecurity.
For example, the Red Team/ Blue Team exercise is a commonly used approach, which gives participants an opportunity to look at the situation from the attacker's perspective and look out for vulnerabilities in the company's systems.
On the other hand, Live-fire exercises simulate real-world cyber attacks and, essentially, push participants to deal with problems that are caused as if they were happening in real life.
After the exercise, it is important to have a close look at the vulnerabilities that your team currently has and come up with the proper plan to fix them over time.
Optimize Costs for R&D and Technology Testing
Cyber exercise platforms also help companies with R&D and technology testing programs, leading them to improve their efficiency and reduce overall costs, which eventually results in gaining a massive competitive advantage in the market.
We can take the digital twin technology as an example, which helps organizations replicate their technical setups. This approach helps them to properly validate the overall strength of their systems.
Other than that, organizations can utilize virtual testing environments for R&D purposes, as it eliminates the need for physical testing setup, which leads to less costs and more efficiency throughout the cycle.
Improve Security Process of Your Organization
Another great way to utilize the cyber exercise platform is to set processes for higher levels of security and ensure cyber preparedness not only for your team but also for your systems.
It is oftentimes challenging to validate the security stack, but the proper use of a cyber exercise platform will help you test your existing security systems and make them more reliable for the entire organization.
In order to achieve that, it is important to test and measure how much time it takes for incident direction systems to get triggered and what types of responses the team initiates from the get-go.
Test New Ideas and Technologies
There are lots of cases when management has interesting ideas on the potential ways that a product can develop or what technologies to implement. However, these types of initiatives can interrupt the ongoing processes and make systems vulnerable to attacks.
That's why a cyber exercise platform is the perfect place to test any new idea you might have to improve the company's overall security.
Thanks to the simulated systems, decision-makers now have the ability to assess new technologies and make informed conclusions about their performances. Basically, it offers a low-risk, low-cost approach to validate new ideas in an effective manner.
Enhance Your Cyber Preparedness With CybExer
When it comes to empowering team members to practice and improve their cybersecurity skills, companies and organizations worldwide must embrace innovative cyber exercise solutions like Cyber Range technology to educate their teams and enhance their cyber resilience.
CybExer has been a driving force in the cybersecurity landscape since 2016. Our advanced cyber range platform assists enterprises with comprehensive cybersecurity training modules designed to elevate their readiness against potential threats.
If you’d like to learn more about our offering and products, schedule a call with our cyber range experts to discuss your organization’s needs.
