Measuring Security Awareness Training on a budget
Rolling out a large Information Security Awareness Training Program can be an incredibly daunting task. Especially, if you have to ensure that your efforts are measurable in order to meet industry standards or adhere to legislation.
Let’s face it, you can’t measure the number of times employees look at the security awareness posters you just put up in the coffee room or in the elevator and how the heck do you measure the impact of a banner on the company intranet? Did it really change the outcomes and behaviors of the employees?
And what about that 1.5 hour live training session? Did anyone actually listen and has implemented the recommendations?
If your budget has been cut and you can’t afford an online training component with a back-end LMS to track and provide reporting functions then start small and try the following techniques:
1. After your live training sessions, walk around and measure the impact by talking to employees and asking questions.
2. At lunch, do “walk-by’s”. Check to see if employees are leaving their desks without adhering to the “clean desk” policy and have left their laptops unlocked, etc. If so, create some friendly reminder cards to place on their desks as reinforcement.
3. Pick a month a year and do a “security awareness month” combine short videos with games and posters that supplements your regular yearly ongoing training programs.
4. Provide incentives (if possible – even an apple, chocolate bar, etc) for those you catch doing the “right” thing when it comes to being security aware.
The key is to track all of these items. Start a spreadsheet and track the number of employees talked to per month, the number of incidents discovered in the walk-by’s and the number of employees caught doing something correctly. Create some nice monthly graphs with the data and provide them to management so they know you are on top of the security awareness issue.
June 19, 2009
4:08 pm
Ken
My concern with security “awareness” is that intentional attacks are always designed to get around what we’re expecting, so, it’s not long before security awareness means teaching distrust.
I prefer, trust but verify. So, the real challenge is how do you TEST awareness or alertness? Reducing these orientations to simple test questions is really quite difficult.
June 19, 2009
5:01 pm
Paul Sand
Security is about people. Most importantly it is about what people really do to protect the assets of the company — not the tools available, not the beautifully articulated policies. Tracking what is really happening (or not happening) measures the important essence of awareness — is someone doing something about what they just learned? This is the only measure of a company’s real state of security.