Why is IT Security Awareness Important?

There are good reasons:

• Before a data breach: Employees with access to data are the single largest contributing factor to modern data breaches. Educating employees on IT Security pitfalls is critical to maintaining data security and avoiding an unwanted data breach.
• After a data breach: Any organization that suffers a data breach that involves loss of personally identifiable information (PII) or sensitive information will experience a loss of public confidence and costly litigation. Liability is minimized if an organization can show that reasonable care had been taken to ensure the confidentially and integrity of such data.

Is eLearning Effective for IT Security Awareness?

Face-to-face delivery of IT Security Awareness is the most effective educational medium, but it is time intensive, costly, and inconvenient to employee schedules, meetings, workloads, vacation, sick leave and personal time off.

eLearning delivery of IT Security Awareness provides a cost-effective, convenient means of delivery for new employees and works conveniently into and around existing employee schedules.

What Other Benefits Does eLearning Provide?

• When a modern Learning Management System (LMS) delivers eLearning to employees, each student is identified and tracked through the course. LMS reports are convenient, accurate and easily available. LMS reports on IT Security Awareness training are a viable metric for security audits.
• elearning reports on quiz scores identify low-scoring employees as possible security risks that may need further investigation.
• eLearning course content can be easily revised throughout the year.

CSI 2007 Survey

In the CSI 2007 Survey, 486 respondents were asked: "to rate the importance of several security awareness topics to their organizations." For more information on how companies view Security Awareness and other Security metrics, download the full CSI report at http://www.gocsi.com.