In a swift growing competitive world, the demands for security training and awareness is increasing. Cyber security needs and its deployment have been the areas of concern for the major global industries. OT security forms a very crucial part of cyber security and proper awareness is required to maintain the privacy of entrepreneurial data and other information of the business sector from the prying eyes. Some examples of OT security are SCADA, CNC, DCS and your employees must be aware of these to ensure an effective and secure work environment.
This blog consists of the steps by which you can create an OT security awareness in your workplace.
1. Introduce employees to phishing attacks
Phishing emails are the ones which contains malicious links, attachments or codes into the network. These are the most common cyber security threat and the employees must be made aware of it. An effective way to test the employees is by sending test emails, which looks legitimate. The number of employees clicking on it, needs more training.
2. Introduce your employees to secure web browsing
Before awaring your employes of secure browsing, ensure to lock all unused ports and isolate ICS networks from all unreliable networks. Now, promote a secure web browsing stimulation exercise among your employees to make them aware of how to recognize trusted web pages and certificates.
3. Use the campaign approach
A simple communication with an employee on the OT security is likely to be of less help. People tend to remember this which they see visually, hear and understand. This is the sole reason people remember advertisements so well. So, you can use this campaign method to give the basic training of OT security awareness to your employees.
4. Validate the training
Providing training to the employees is not enough. You need to validate it to ensure that they are clear with the security concerns and how to deal with them. A quiz can be conducted at the end of the training session, to understand how much the employees have understood, to identify the knowledge gaps.
5. Take Professional Help
To ensure the maximum protection to your business against prevalent security threats, take the professional help. The training programs empower the employees with the right knowledge of OT cyber security awareness. Since the staffs handle critical process control and industrial automation on a regular basis, they must be fully aware of security risks relevant to their work.
OT security is very important for certain industries like aerospace, pharmaceutical, defense, healthcare etc. To make business decisions, generally applications, networks,databases and systems are used. Hence, the environment around the OT needs to be protected to ensure proper security against cyber threats.
So, all you need to do is take the professional help for making your employees understand the needs of OT security. Business owners need to be careful and take the security issues and trainings seriously as protecting confidential data should be the priority of every business. With these five steps you can start spreading the OT awareness among your employees through effective training sessions.