How DeskAlerts Can Help Your Company’s Cyber Security Strategy

Many organizations struggle with cyber security – this is evident by the number who become victims of cyber crime every year.

Global organizations and small businesses are targeted, and everything in between. The estimated cost to the world’s economy of cyber crime each year is $400 billion – it’s big business for cyber criminal and unlikely to disappear any time soon. In fact it continues to be more sophisticated, causing major headaches for IT departments everywhere.

There are many things you can do to improve your company’s cyber security performance, but one of the major things you can do is to educate your employees around their role and responsibility in keeping your data safe.

A 2015 survey of staff at hundreds of US companies by CompTIA found that 52 per cent of data breaches happen because of human error. It’s not software systems that are failing when it comes to security: it’s people.

An extremely useful tool to use for education and training of your staff and to help foster and encourage a culture of security is DeskAlerts. It’s a cost-effective solution to cut through some of the biggest challenges that organizations face when it comes to cyber security.

These are the ways it can help you:

Education and training

Many companies include IT security as part of the initiation process for new employees, and then never follow up. Cyber security needs to be an ongoing education process where you not only offer refresher training, but educate about new and emerging threats in the ever-evolving world of cyber security.

When your policies, procedures and even online training resources sit on part of your intranet site, you’re making the assumption that staff will actively seek these resources out to use them.

DeskAlerts can be deployed to alert staff to IT security training modules they need to complete in a way that they can’t ignore by sending a pop-up message straight to their desktops.

You can target the entire organization, work teams, offices by geographic locations or even individual users you have identified may need some extra guidance.

Ongoing hints and tips

As well as being used to direct staff to intensive training modules, you can also use the features of DeskAlerts to provide ongoing hints and tips about cyber security. As well as using the DeskAlerts pop-ups to provide information, you can use aspects such as the scrolling ticker or corporate screensaver to reinforce your messages around security.

You can even use DeskAlerts to survey your staff to get an idea of where the gaps might be in their knowledge of IT security, or make quizzes and polls to engage them.

Communicate during an attack

Many of our DeskAlerts clients report they use the system to raise awareness when there is a threat. For example the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust told us they used DeskAlerts to warn users about the recent Wannacry ransomware threat to encourage vigilance.

If there is a cyber attack, DeskAlerts can be quickly deployed to let every user in the organization know to minimize the harm, and to let them know what steps to take – communicating via email will not achieve this success.