Cyber drills offer organizations hands-on, measurable exercises to prove and improve cyber readiness, mitigating risks and ensuring workforce resilience against attacks.
Over the past few years, we have continued to see major organizations fall victim to record-breaking cyber attacks, resulting in massive data breaches, tarnished brand reputations, and millions of dollars in long-tail damages from expensive remediation, legal costs, and recovery efforts. Cyber threats are growing in maturity and complexity, and the global average cost of a data breach is now estimated at $4.88M. This begs the question: how are organizations readying themselves to combat evolving cyber threats?
The Path Forward: Cyber Drilling
Nearly half of businesses have experienced a cyber attack in the past 12 months, showing how pervasive threats have become. With this in mind, it’s troubling that cyber decision-makers spend only 39% of their time assessing and improving cyber readiness. One reason for this is that too many organizations rely on legacy training which is often an infrequent, check-the-box exercise that fails to demonstrate real cyber capabilities across the organization. To protect revenues and reputations effectively, organizations must urgently prioritize continuous exercising to prove and improve cyber capabilities across the workforce.Â
Fortunately, cyber leaders are beginning to see that these legacy training programs do not adequately prepare their workforce and are increasingly opting for regular cyber drilling and exercises that help leaders prove readiness and resilience. In fact, 94% of organizations have already implemented cyber drills or plan to in the next 3 years. Cyber drills offer hands-on, measurable exercise programs for specific individuals, teams, and departments that are essential in mitigating the impact of various cyber events. With cyber drilling, leaders can prove and improve their organization’s knowledge, skills, and judgment against simulated attacks, ultimately helping to better understand their organization’s cyber capabilities and shortcomings.Â
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Getting Leadership on Board
It is evident that cyber resilience is no longer just an IT issue – it’s a business issue, as it permeates all business functions, industries, and bottom lines. It’s now more important to get the board and C-level executives on board and prove investments into cyber resilience are paying off. This is no secret to cyber leaders, with 96% saying that effectively communicating cyber readiness to senior leadership and Boards will be crucial in 2025. A rise in attacks and requirements of regulations likely drives this.
What are the best practices for communicating with the board and C-level executives? First, it’s important to get ahead of evolving cyber risks, so cyber leaders should advocate for regular cyber drills and micro-drilling that helps organizations identify skills gaps before it’s too late and take decisive action to upskill these teams. Additionally, when they implement cyber drills, leaders gain the ability to prove cyber capabilities and tell the boards either 1) we’re ready, or 2) we need more investment in an area to improve vital cyber capabilities. The truth of the matter is that no one can hide skills deficits in a crisis and with the widespread implications of an attack, business leaders must know and take responsibility for any cyber shortcomings.
Gaining The Human Edge
With human error responsible for 74% of breaches, over-reliance on tech stacks and legacy cyber training is inexcusable. Rather than human error creating more cyber risks, organizations should be adopting data-driven approaches to ready their workforce and actually make humans the asset. Achieving the human edge over attackers requires teams across the organization to be armed with knowledge, skills, and judgment to respond effectively to a cyber crisis. To ensure a workforce is ready for the next threat, cyber drills and hands-on exercises must become as routine as fire drills. Like fire drills, cyber drilling is effective because of the mock exercise component. Managers and employees enact the real-world motions that would be triggered in the event of a fire – they don’t watch a video or take a multiple-choice test that favors completion over comprehension; they practice continuously.
This hands-on approach is what actually commits the associated actions to muscle memory, making them reflexive if a real crisis does occur. Cyber leaders must apply the very same approach to cybersecurity, making their workforce their strongest defense against the evolving cyber landscape.
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Is Your Workforce Ready?
The evidence is there, traditional legacy cybersecurity training is a thing of the past. The only real way to know whether one’s workforce is actually ready for a cyber attack is by adopting an approach that offers realistic simulations and exercises that allow you to leverage granular individual and team performance data. This helps continuously prove and improve capabilities across the organization, aligned to security frameworks. With this insight, cyber leaders can also prove strong ROI and make the case for continued cyber investments to further support cyber efforts. At the end of the day, an organization or team is only as strong as its constituent parts; that said, ensuring each individual can plug in effectively to work together as a team is critical.
