The Importance of Automation for Security Awareness

Welcome to Gone Phishing, a show diving into the cybersecurity threats that surround our highly connected lives. Every human is different, and every person has unique vulnerabilities that expose them to potentially successful social engineering. On this show, we'll discuss human vulnerability and how it relates to unique individuals.

The Importance of Automation in Security Awareness Programs

Today, we're talking about how important automation is in your security awareness program, especially for Managed Service Providers (MSPs).

What is an MSP?

An MSP, or Managed Service Provider, serves hundreds, if not thousands, of small to medium to enterprise-sized customers. They bring IT and security expertise to the vast majority of employees who don't work at Fortune 500 companies, particularly in the US.

Why is Automation Critical for MSPs?

Automation is an incredibly powerful tool for MSPs. If not leveraged correctly, it can result in significant costs for providing services that could otherwise be automated. MSPs continuously seek ways to automate as much as possible to save time and resources.

Automation in Awareness Training

Many technicians and MSPs have shared their experiences in building security awareness programs. These conversations have informed the development of platforms designed to automate repetitive tasks, saving MSPs significant time.

Typical Steps in a Security Awareness Program

1. 1.Uploading Employees: Employees are uploaded to a platform, often manually, or through integrations with services like Exchange, Azure AD, or Google Workspace.
2. 2.Building a Training Program: The program is often dictated by compliance requirements, cyber insurance policies, or security frameworks like CIS controls. This may involve creating role-specific training for different groups.
3. 3.Maintaining User Lists: Technicians must ensure user lists are up to date, adding or removing users as needed, often by hand.
4. 4.Scheduling Training Content: Training content (e.g., monthly videos) must be selected and scheduled for delivery to all employees.
5. 5.Repeating for Each Client: For MSPs with multiple clients, this process must be repeated for each one, often from scratch.
6. 6.Phishing Assessments: Unique phishing assessments must be selected, scheduled, and delivered, again repeating the process for each client.

This process is highly repetitive and time-consuming. Technicians often look forward to offloading these tasks, as they do not require specialized expertise and take up valuable time.

The Value of Automation

Automation can give technicians their time back. Instead of spending hours each day managing repetitive tasks, automation allows them to focus on higher-value activities, such as meeting with clients and demonstrating expertise in IT infrastructure and cybersecurity.

For MSPs managing more than 20 clients, the workload of building and maintaining security programs becomes significant. At around 70 clients, it often becomes a full-time job for someone. Without automation, scaling security services is difficult and less profitable.

Impact on Clients and Security

Clients care about the expertise and professionalism of their MSP, not about the manual selection of phishing emails or training content. Automation allows MSPs to spend more time engaging with clients and less time on repetitive tasks.

Automation also helps ensure that security programs do not lapse. There have been instances where training or phishing assessments stopped without anyone noticing, leading to clients paying for services they weren't receiving and potentially impacting cyber insurance coverage.

Choosing the Right Partnerships

MSPs and security practitioners often feel pressure to be experts in every area of IT and security. By leveraging automated tools and strong partnerships, they can scale their services and reduce the mental load of managing everything manually.

Final Thoughts

The ultimate goal is to reduce the risk of social engineering leading to theft of information, access, or money. Automation is key to achieving this at scale. MSPs and internal IT teams should regularly assess what tasks they are repeating and consider what can be automated or delegated to partners or vendors.

Thank you for tuning in to Gone Phishing. For more information on high-quality security awareness training campaigns and how to launch them effectively, visit Phin Security's website or connect on LinkedIn.