Every organization is at serious risk without new-school security awareness training. With an average baseline PPP of 27 percent, companies could be exposed to social engineering and phishing scams by more than a quarter of their workforce.

Any organization can strengthen security through staff training in as little as three months. The power of a good training program is to instill anti-phishing behavior management and social engineering education in a rapid timeframe.

An effective security awareness training strategy can help accelerate results,  especially for large organizations. The struggle of some enterprise leaders to successfully implement security training effectively across the organization is not surprising. But it does indicate that leaders can set themselves up for success by assessing their goals and plotting an organizational strategy before rolling out training.

When you invest in Security Awareness Training and Phishing Security Testing you see value and ROI – fast. Once organizations understand where they stack up after doing an initial baseline phishing security test, proving value and ROI are at the top of the list to gain buy-in and budget. The results of the KnowBe4 Phishing Industry Benchmarking Report clearly show where organizations’ Phish-prone percentages started and where they ended up after 12 months of regular testing and security awareness training.

The overall industry initial Phish-prone percentage benchmark turned out to be a troubling 27 percent. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Fortunately, the data showed that this 27 percent can be brought down more than half to just 13 percent in only 90 days by deploying new-school security awareness training. The 12-month results show that by following these best practices, the final Phish-prone percentage can be minimized to 2.17 percent on average. Another way to look at the results: Organizations improved their failure rate by an astounding 94 percent in one year after using the KnowBe4 platform.

Today, reducing the Phish-prone percentage of your employees through new-school security awareness training is one of the most cost-effective network protection measures organizations can take. Two common goals of security awareness training are risk reduction and compliance. Risk reduction is the most important one and has by far the biggest Security ROI. Forrester Research assessed the performance of the KnowBe4 platform in their 2017 Total Economic Impact (TEI™) Study and found a 127 percent return-on-investment with a one-month payback.