Celebrate National CyberSecurity Awareness (NCSA) Month!
Each October, the National Cybersecurity Alliance celebrates National CyberSecurity Awareness month! Here’s how to turn this into client celebrations to help them promote greater cyberhygiene!
Ambitious, aggressive technologists take fullest possible advantage of every opportunity to turn current events into future profits.
One event that recurs every October gives technologists a wonderful opportunity to help their clients promote effective cyber hygiene by using it to celebrate the success their users have recently had in protecting their company’s data and network.
Now in its 20th year, National CyberSecurity Awareness Month (NCSA) is presented annually by the National CyberSecurity Alliance (yeah, also NCSA), “a non-profit organization on a mission to create a more secure, interconnected world.” Tech industry members of the Alliance include IBM, eset, Terranova, Amazon, Lenovo, Dell, Norton, Cofense, KnowBe4, Facebook, Microsoft, proofpoint, ServiceNow, Cisco, and Trend Micro.
The Best Way to Motivate is to Celebrate
Especially with ransomware continuing to be among the most prevalent cyber threats, user training, coaching, and refreshers are critical to protecting networks. Technologists advise their clients to remind all users that security is everybody’s responsibility. Many firms offer excellent training courses and pop-up-style reminder events. The challenge is to take a community that is often overworked and overloaded and motivating them to keep data and network security in front-of-mind.
Technologists can provide excellent support to their clients by counseling them to celebrate their wins. Collect the details every time a user prevents a cyber attack and announce them during refresher events, or in the corporate newsletter, or other internal communications.
NCSA month (from NCSA) offers an excellent month-long opportunity for such celebration. Every year, the NCSA announces four major messages for NCSA month. They then roll out one each week in detail on their memorably named website at http://staysafeonline.org
This year’s themes are:
The links take you to NCSA content on each of the key messages. Many other useful resources are also available on their website.
Potential Celebrations
October can be a real win for technologists who take the opportunity to leverage NCSA in ways that benefit their clients. Potential celebrations include:
Consider hosting celebration events for your selected clients to recognize their employees who have stepped up and exercised their responsibility. Perhaps even offer a special award to a selected employee whose actions were especially astute, rapid, and impactful.
Offer special celebration sessions in which you can refresh everyone’s awareness of the challenges they face. Update them on the current attack statistics. Include stats that are specifically relevant to their company, in their industry and in their market.
Provide content for your client’s company newsletter regarding security issues your firm helped resolve during the previous year. This will raise employee awareness of your services and increase the likelihood that they will engage you whenever and wherever they see gaps in their security.
Encourage client employees to attend the many webinars and view the various videos NCSA provides during NCSA month. Your recommendation of these resources aligns you with them in the perceptions of your client’s people.
If you provide cybersecurity training, use this opportunity to call attention to your curriculum and encourage employees to raise their profile within their company by attending training and becoming a security leader among their peers.
A Good Time for Introspection
If your practice is not specifically focused on security services, October is a great time to focus inward and determine if you provide a sufficient scope of security services that your clients truly need. If not, you may decide to upskill some of your people, hire new people with the requisite skills (if you can find them) or consider partnering with a well-regarded, trustworthy partner to add appropriate data and network security services to your portfolio.
A Visit is Worth Your Time
I’ve been writing about NCSA month for 20 years this year. My experience with the materials and other resources they provide is that they’re mostly excellent. Everyone will find value in learning more about cybersecurity and maintaining excellent cyber hygiene. Whether your clients are small businesses, mid-market, enterprise, SLED, or even residential, you’ll find content your clients will appreciate. Visit http://staysafeonline,org
.