Fortinet Launches New Security Awareness and Training Service

Fortinet introduces a new Security Awareness and Training service to provide organisations further protection against threats through employee training and education.

Fortinet says that it believes that all organisations should be deploying awareness programmes for all employees and users to truly protect their most-important digital assets and as part of their security strategy. These programmes must be designed in a programmatic way to prove effective in changing employee behaviour whereby employees are more cyber aware and able to spot malicious threats and other risks for their organisations.

Risks Resulting From the Evolving Threat Landscape and Hybrid Workforce

The traditional workday has fundamentally changed with the significant increase in remote and hybrid work as a result of the pandemic. For instance, in Upwork’s “Future Workforce Report 2021: How Remote Work is Changing Businesses Forever,” the authors conclude, “Our study predicts that fully remote workers will represent 27.7% of the workforce, compared to 20.4% who will be partially remote. Both numbers have increased from when we last ran this survey in November 2020.” These two factors have resulted in cyber attackers focusing on social engineering, phishing tactics, and more toward employees who can many times be an organization’s weakest link.

Introducing the Fortinet Security Awareness and Training Service

Employees represent high-value targets for threat actors. As a result, organisations can’t overlook the risk introduced by an untrained workforce where a simple error or moment of poor judgment opens to the door to a threat actor.

Created by the Fortinet Training Institute, the new Security Awareness and Training service helps IT, security and compliance leaders build a cyber-aware culture where employees recognize and avoid falling victim to cyberattacks. For compliance-sensitive organizations, the service also helps leaders satisfy regulatory and industry compliance-training requirements. Benefits of the new service include:

• Curriculum from the award-winning Fortinet Training Institute The service is designed by the Fortinet Training Institute, which provides cybersecurity certification and training through its various programmes.

• Alignment to NIST 800-50 and NIST 800-16 guidelines The service is aligned to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines NIST 800-50 and NIST 800-16, providing training and awareness that is engaging and relevant on topics such as: information security, data privacy, physical security, password protection, and internet security.

• Intelligence-driven training Leveraging FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence, the Security Awareness and Training service provides training informed by developments observed across the threat landscape.

Many organisations take a minimalist approach to security awareness training. Usually, this is the result of a reactive approach to security that is likely complying with some type of requirement their organization is being subjected to by a partner or by some type of regulatory or industry compliance framework.

To change behaviour, IT and security teams need to apply a programmatic approach. This approach involves conducting numerous touch points, formats, and tools across a span to educate, test, and reinforce as well as adapt learning to achieve the desired outcome. This is where Fortinet’s new Security Awareness and Training service can help organizations implement a unique training program for all employees to be cyber aware.

At Fortinet, its own guidance is that all organisations should have a security awareness training programme in place that achieves the aim of changing employee behaviour and helps IT and security teams enhance their organisations’ overall security postures. This is best done through a programmatic approach that is ongoing, incorporates a number of elements to educate, test, reinforce, and adapt learning to address changes in the overall threat landscape as well as the needs of the organization’s risk profile. Learn more about Fortinet’s new Security Awareness and Training service to help achieve exactly that.

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