Why is Security Awareness Training Crucial to Compliance?
It's pretty simple, really. Done correctly, security awareness training is an ongoing educational process that keeps your employees informed and engaged in data protection and security threats—key elements of nearly every regulatory compliance standard.
Key Takeaways
- Security awareness training is essential for compliance, ensuring employees understand and follow data protection policies.
- Human error is a leading cause of security incidents, making continuous, behavior-focused training critical to reducing risk.
- Effective employee security awareness programs improve audit readiness, regulatory alignment, and overall cybersecurity posture.
We've talked before about how security awareness training enables your team to serve as your best defense against phishing emails and other socially engineered attacks from bad actors. That same training can help your organization maintain diligence when it comes to compliance by providing the knowledge to handle sensitive information safely and within regulatory frameworks. Ongoing training also helps keep those important details top of mind with employees who could easily lose sight of compliance and security on busy days.
Tip #1: Make sure you work closely with your managed services provider to select a security awareness training program that addresses compliance. Many programs focus solely on phishing and other business email compromise (BEC) attacks, but don't provide options for compliance issues.
Is Employee Security Training Required For Compliance Standards?
In many cases, yes! Compliance often focuses on data protection, privacy, and accountability—all elements of a solid cybersecurity posture—and reinforced through security awareness training. Additionally, just as your employees can be your best defense, they are also often unwittingly your biggest point of failure when it comes to security. That is because they are targeted with a nearly nonstop barrage of sneaky attacks trying to access the data protected through compliance standards.
If you are an organization in one of the many sectors governed by complex compliance rules, you have to remember that some of the biggest threats to data in your environment are accessed through your team. Sometimes, cyber criminals get it because of a click on a phishing email, sometimes because of weak passwords. In other circumstances, it might be accidental data sharing. Worst case, your employees are bypassing policies for convenience, and data is exposed.
Bottom line: If your compliance strategy doesn't include security awareness training, it's incomplete.
The Role of Security Awareness Training in Compliance
Listen, we don't mean to sound alarming. But layering on security awareness training is a common-sense and affordable way to make certain that the compliance framework you have documented is making its way through your entire organization. Training ensures your employees understand security and compliance policies and are following security best practices that support your organization's documentation.
With security awareness training in place, leadership can demonstrate due diligence. It shows that you have the strategy in place and are taking the right steps to educate and engage your team. Plus, training helps support overall security by reducing human risk and reinforcing required controls. Most compliance standards are looking for education, policies, and procedures, all of which are addressed by security awareness training.
Let's be honest, most businesses are doing their best to meet standards. But while policies exist, they may not be followed. While controls exist, they may be bypassed. Those actions usually don't happen because your employees don't care, but rather because they don't understand the reasons for the policies and controls, or their critical role in executing them. Security awareness training helps your organization answer a common compliance audit question: "Can you prove your users understand and follow the steps?"
Tip #2: Your MSP can help build the foundation for compliance with best practices and guidance around both technology solutions and effective policies.
Avoiding the Most Common Security Awareness Training Mistakes
Most companies treat security awareness training as an annual event, a task checkbox they "should" complete. Maybe it's a random video training or a single guest speaker. Effective security awareness training is much more. It is an essential part of a cohesive security culture that starts with leadership and cascades throughout the organization. You cannot talk about cybersecurity and compliance once a year and expect behaviors to change and employees to engage.
Instead, appropriate security awareness training is delivered on a regularly scheduled cadence and addresses multiple scenarios. Done right, it not only reduces the likelihood of breaches (often as much as 70%), it also:
- Strengthens compliance audit readiness
- Protects sensitive data and, by extension, your organizational reputation
- Supports cyber insurance requirements
- Builds a culture of understanding and accountability
What Effective Security Awareness Training Looks Like
As you evaluate security awareness training programs, there are certain elements to consider. We'll say it again, your trusted business technology partner should have clear recommendations. If they don't offer training, they should have a partner to recommend. From there, they should also help you with adjacent aspects of an effective security awareness training plan.
Training is continuous, not annual
- Offers ongoing micro-training sessions that are digestible vs. overwhelming
- Regular reinforcement through simple but effective examples and scenarios
- Updates are aligned to new threats and continue to evolve with the threat landscape
The program is behavior-focused
- Uses real-world scenarios (phishing, social engineering)
- Includes practical decision-making guidance
- Not just a checkbox policy review but true clarity
Engagement is measurable
- Phishing simulation results are quick and well-defined with recommendations for next steps
- User risk scoring helps provide insights and opportunities for more in-depth activities where needed
- Training completion is tracked, and engagement metrics are simple to understand
Training is tied to policy and compliance
- Reinforces internal policies and positions them with context
- Aligns with regulatory requirements tailored for your industry
- Supports audit documentation for regulatory standard reporting
Learn more about security awareness training in our free guide
How MSPs Support Turning Policies into Practice
You may have noticed that Exigent feels strongly about security awareness training (our CTO calls it one of the single most important security steps any organization can take). That importance only grows for businesses operating in sectors governed by compliance. That's because most organizations don't fall out of compliance because they fail to plan for it. That scenario happens when they don't educate and engage their employees. Behavior must support strategy. That is where security awareness training hits—it turns policy into practice.
Your MSP should provide clear guidance throughout this process. From helping define and deploy the technology and policies required for compliance to offering training that addresses the human side of the equation.
If you'd like to discuss how, let's talk.