We show you in this blog how creating a security first culture can minimize the risk of cyberattacks. It tells you what it is, what it can do, and how to get it from employee training, awareness campaigns, and even gaming.

Key Points:

• Embracing a security-first culture in your organization means building security consciousness and policies into the business culture and operations to increase the employee’s security awareness for cyber-attacks.
• The security-first culture has the following benefits: Increased understanding of phishing scams and cyber-attacks, employee vigilance, and the human aspect which is the weakest link.
• Implementing security-first culture means having an onboarding process that focuses on security, interactive training, integrating security training into the work day, etc.
• Data security tools such as can help your security culture be bolstered, providing you with visibility on your private data and allow you to manage it.

The culture of a business is a huge deal, including the structure of your organization.

Security as part of the culture in your organization will increase your team’s awareness of the threat cyberthreats pose. And the more eyes you have on phishing schemes or any kind of attacks, the better.

What is a security-first culture?

If you want a solid security base against the cyber-attack and make security part of everything you do, you have to make the whole organization feel secure.

Defining a security-first culture

Security-first culture is everything where security is at the core of everything your company does. Not only is it up to the IT team – everyone gets involved in data security. 

The point is, whether you’re in the top leadership or a pretty junior level employee, security should become part of your day-to-day operations and strategic decisions. 

Fundamentals of a security-first culture.

What this means in practice is security-first culture where everyone in your team knows why security is so important and what they can do to help.

Here are a few things you’d see at work in a security-first society.

• Good password habits: We’ll all be enforcing robust, one-of-a-kind passwords and security mechanisms such as MFA to protect our accounts.
• Ongoing security training: Teams will be regularly trained on latest threats and best practices. Cyber security education for example has been reported to save 70% of security risk.
• Problems reported quickly: Team members won’t ignore something – a phishing email, say – when they discover something is wrong. They call it out immediately and then security team can investigate.

Aligning security with company values

In a security first organization, security is not a tick-box to be checked; it is part of your organisational culture. 

Much like value-driven emphasis on teamwork and customer care, security-first is a way to show data-securing is central to who you are as a company. 

By making security a job, it doesn’t seem like something extra you do, but rather a very critical part of your job in order to ensure the success of the company.

The investment in long-term security-first culture building.

Creating a security-first culture doesn’t happen overnight. It’s time-consuming, hard work and very constant work. 

But long term, the payoffs are clear: less susceptibility to cyber-crime, increased data security, and a more secure company in general.

What are the advantages of security-first culture?

Having a human firewall in your company can make your employees more wary of phishing scams, cyberattacks, etc. It gives you more eyes on what could be damaging to the business, and ties up your lowest common denominator for security – your employees.

In 2022, Verizon’s Data Breach Investigation Report recorded that 82% of data breaches had a human factor, so it’s important to have your employees adopt security-care as a priority.

How can we engineer a security first culture?

Some of the things you can do to foster security first culture:

1. Make everyone buy in.

You lose your whole team if you can’t get people to really pay attention to security (it’s never been a great conversation to be having). The introduction of this in your hiring and onboarding processes across your entire organization should be a part of your data security program right from the start. 

Learn by doing with your employees and conduct workshops to implement the training. If you have your team on board with the need for security and the ramifications if they’re not, it’ll be easy to build your human firewall.

2. Stress the fact that risk is part of the deal.

You’ll have to sell yourself that security isn’t cheap. Make it stick if you demonstrate the risk:

• You might bring up real-world examples of the financial and reputational damage that companies have experienced as a result of it to show how much damage cyberattacks can do, and where they went wrong exactly.
• If you can pick a company within your industry for your case study, it can communicate how dangerous cyber-attacks such as phishing scams can be, and how you can relate to your business.

3. Inform workers about the latest business risk.

And we’d think everyone follows the news but, we don’t always. Inform your staff about any new emerging threats that could threaten the business and what to do in case they discover one.

• To whom should they turn first?
• What do they have to report when they encounter a new cyberattack?

4. Integrate security training into the day to day lives.

Don’t spend hours completing a training every year, but implement security training as part of daily life and you will make your policies stick. Help people in all types of ways and not just through online training and always bear in mind that everyone learns differently so what might work for one person might not work for another. 

5. Incentivize anyone that’s willing to make a deliberate effort to build on security.

Everyone loves a reward. Cash, gift cards, whatever it is that makes your business unique rewards can keep them hooked on security. Just give your employees a decent award and they will be inspired to participate. 

6. Add it to your business’ overall purpose.

Bring up security when discussing the bigger picture and vision of the company. If your team understands how important it is to the company, they can implement it into their own individual targets too. 

For example, if security for customers’ data is your #1 priority, then your customer success team won’t post sensitive data on Slack. 

7. Keep it fun

Security is not exactly a fun brand. But when you integrate security into company quizzes or quarterly hackathons, that can change. These are very competitive, and can push your employees to think outside the box when it comes to security. 

Reversing the story about security that it isn’t boring but it can be an interesting thing to learn — can alter your team’s entire mindset towards security training.

How can Metomic help?

Data security tools such as Metomic can help to make your organization more security-first by allowing you to see your data and take ownership. 

Employee notifications set in SaaS apps like Slack — this is how you alert your team on where they’re doing wrong and expose them to your security standards.  You get data security under everybody’s roof and that makes it much easier to handle. For more information on Metomic for your business, schedule a one-on-one meeting with one of our cyber security consultants.