Security awareness training is the most underspent sector of the cybersecurity market, but it’s poised to become a multi-billion-dollar industry in 2017.
That’s according to a report from Cybersecurity Ventures, which also said that the market will top $10 billion by 2027.
According to Steve Morgan, founder and editor-in-chief at Cybersecurity Ventures, Fortune 500 and Global 2000 corporations will consider security awareness training as fundamental to their cyber-defense strategies by 2021, with small businesses following shortly thereafter.
Organizations of every size are starting to recognize that inside threats are as significant as outside threats, the research postulates, and users will be a crucial part of any organization’s information security program. So, training those users to recognize the overtures of malicious actors will be critical to hardening the “people layer,” also known as the last line of defense against cyberattacks.
Awareness training that combines interactive training in the browser with frequent simulated phishing attacks straight into the user’s email inbox has “proven to be very effective in creating a human firewall, a company’s last line of defense,” said Stu Sjouwerman, CEO of report sponsor KnowBe4. “New-school security awareness training has by far the best ROI of any security layer. Users see phish-prone percentages go from an average of 15 to 20% down to 1% or 2% after a year.”