What Makes a Good Cyber Security Training Solution?
Picture this: A skilled hacker is lurking in the digital shadows, ready to pounce on any vulnerability in your organization’s cybersecurity defenses.
With the rise of remote work, the threat landscape has become even more treacherous, leading to a staggering 25% increase in fraud cases from 2020 to 2022, according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS).
The question isn’t whether your organization will be targeted, but when. In the face of such looming danger, how do you ensure your team is prepared and your digital assets are safeguarded?
The answer lies in choosing the right cyber security training solution, one that equips your employees with the knowledge and skills to defend against evolving cyber threats.
In this article, we’ll take you on a journey through the critical aspects of selecting a cyber security training solution, including the utilization of cyber ranges, that can fortify your organization’s cyber resilience.
What Is the Goal of Using a Cyber Security Training Solution?
Before organizations choose a reliable training solution for their team, they must understand what are the objectives of investing their resources into that.
Let’s have a look at some of the most important aspects to think about:
- Better security awareness among the team
It is important to keep in mind that the cyber security training program should help employees better understand cyber risks, improving their skills to identify potential threats. This way, you can ensure high-level cyber safety for your company.
- Readiness for incident response
Effective training also equips your team members with the skills and knowledge required to effectively respond to cyber incidents whenever they occur. At the same time, it teaches how to report incidents and document the solution.
- Improved risk mitigation
A well-designed cybersecurity training program educates employees about different procedures and security policies, which minimizes the chance of human errors that can lead to security breaches and can be fatal for an entire organization.
- Compliance
Fulfilling the compliance requirements is one of the highest priorities for any organization out there. A proper cyber training program can help companies meet those requirements and increase awareness among their employees.
Types of Cyber Security Exercises
It is a controlled, real-world simulation of a cyber attack where an organization’s cybersecurity team actively responds to a cyber threat.
This exercise helps participants simulate and practice defending against real-world cyber threats by allowing them to work together and respond to those attacks rapidly and effectively.
The aim is to give participants a realistic training experience in defending IT systems under intense attack scenarios.
This is a cyber range exercise where a team of cybersecurity experts works together in a simulated environment to find and stop threats with a collaborative effort.
Think of it as a process of detectives searching for clues in a crime scene – a team of participants is looking for clues and evidence of suspicious activities, such as detecting computer viruses or hackers attempting to steal information using various methods.
This is a type of exercise that challenges participants to find and exploit computer system vulnerabilities in a system to “capture a flag,” which can be a specific piece of information or code hidden within the system.
Capture-the-flag exercise aims to provide a realistic and challenging experience that helps participants develop skills in a controlled environment.
What Makes a Good Cyber Security Training Solution?
There are a couple of factors that can help organizations evaluate if the cyber security training solution is effective or not. Other than ensuring employee skills growth, it should also bring benefits that will help you optimize processes and enhance cyber resilience.
Let’s have a look at the most prominent deciding factors when it comes to choosing a proper training solution for your team:
Address Employee Skills Gap
A good cyber security training solution must provide valuable resources for organizations that are looking to address the skills gaps among their team members.
By utilizing the different challenges that cyber ranges provide, companies can ensure that their employees get the necessary training and skills to be prepared for cyber threats and maintain the security of their digital assets.
Generally, cyber ranges address skills gap problems with individual skills testing methods, where employees are given assessments to test their knowledge and understand various cybersecurity topics.
Enhance Cyber Security Skills for Your Teams
Cyber security training solutions must also be a reliable tool for organizations that helps them enhance their team’s cybersecurity skills and improve overall security posture.
Exercises like the Red Team/ Blue Team cybersecurity exercise push participants to think from the perspective of an attacker and find vulnerabilities in their systems and processes.
Live-fire exercises involve simulating real-world cyber attacks, giving teams the opportunity to resolve the problem as if it were happening in real life. This way, employees build their response and resolution skills on both the team and individual levels.
Help Team Members to Collaborate and Learn More Each Other
It is essential for organizations to help their cybersecurity professionals practice their collaboration skills. A company’s cybersecurity success depends a lot on the team’s efforts, and organizations must find a way to help their employees practice it.
Fortunately, cyber ranges provide this opportunity to let the team practice their collaboration skills in simulated cyberattack scenarios – cyber range creates an ideal environment for cooperation and helps participants understand how to react in different attack scenarios with the team.
Cost Optimization for R&D and Technology Testing
A good cyber security training solution should also help companies with R&D and technology testing programs, which can potentially lead to reduced costs, improved efficiency, and faster time-to-market for organizations, giving them a competitive advantage over others on the market.
For example, using the digital twin approach and replicating live technical setups for a specific purpose can help to significantly reduce the costs of testing and validating the robustness of live systems.
At the same time, cyber ranges provide virtual testing environments, which can be well-used for Research and Development purposes. This way, companies don’t need physical testing environments anymore, resulting in reduced costs and increased efficiency for the process.
Security Process Optimization for Organizations
When organizations choose their cyber security training solution, they should also keep in mind that this tool must help them optimize security processes and ensure a higher level of reliability among team members.
Validating the security stack can be challenging, but the proper cyber range technology will allow companies to test, adjust, and validate their existing incident response plans.
Realistic Simulations
It is important for modern organizations to provide realistic and hands-on simulations of cyber threats and attacks.
That’s why the cyber security training solution that organization chooses to use has to create realistic simulations for exercises, allowing participants to practice their skills in a safe and controlled environment.
CybExer Technologies – Leading the Way to Cyber Excellence
When it comes to empowering team members to practice and improve their cybersecurity skills, companies and organizations worldwide must embrace innovative training solutions such as Cyber Range technology to educate their teams and enhance their cyber resilience.
CybExer Technologies 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.
