3 best practices for maintaining a culture of security

Security and compliance have become increasingly important drivers for businesses that want to lead their industries and garner trust from their customers. While you can adopt all the tools and processes that uphold security, these don’t mean much if you don’t establish a culture of security within your business. 

In a previous article, we talked about how to build a culture of security and compliance within your organization. Today, we’re sharing best practices for maintaining and evolving that culture of security as needed.

Let’s get started.

How do you establish a culture of security?

As we discussed in our previous piece, there are a number of things you can do to embed a culture of security within your organization. This includes: 

• Getting your leadership on board. Understand how security aligns with each executive’s business objectives and use those drivers to make them ambassadors for your efforts. 
• Connecting everything back to the organization’s values. Your team members are already on board with what the business stands for, so finding alignment with your existing values will make it easier for employees to adopt security measures. 
• Making it a two-way conversation. This way, employees can ask questions or provide feedback as you roll out security measures. 
• Keeping it entertaining. Change can be challenging for a lot of people. Gamifying new measures or introducing some fun into your messaging can go a long way with encouraging adoption. 
• Leveraging the right technologies. Find tools that are easy to use and can be easily integrated into your existing tech stack. 

These various approaches can help streamline your security and compliance rollout efforts — but what happens next? What can you do to ensure that this culture of security has longevity?

1. Create a template for security rollouts 

You know it, we know it: security is a consistently evolving process within an organization. There are always new threats to account for and new regulations to respond to. This means you’ll often have to introduce new features or technologies within your organization. 

To help ensure adoption, it’s worth creating a rollout plan template that feels recognizable to employees, and easy to implement. Use what you know about the organization (e.g. attention span, language employees respond to, whether gamification is successful) to create this rollout plan template. 

In addition, each time you use it, be sure to measure the success and effectiveness of the initiative. Each rollout will be an opportunity to request feedback and identify any areas for improvement.

2. Make security an ongoing conversation

With each of your departments focused on doing the important work they do for your business, it’s likely that they’re not thinking about security unless they have to — and that’s fine as long as they’re not doing anything that’s non-compliant. However, it’s still important to keep security and compliance near the top of the general consciousness within your organization. You can do this by having a security update at each town hall meeting, doing rotating visits at different department meetings, or even having an internal security newsletter that features success stories and upcoming updates. 

Remember, a conversation goes both ways. As you engage with other employees, find different ways to get their insights on what’s working and what’s not. This could be via short surveys, one-on-one conversations, or even as part of a team presentation. Here, we suggest being careful to not oversaturate employees. Take a varied approach so that people don’t get bored or dismissive any time they see a security update in their inbox or on an agenda.

3. Partner with your comms and marketing team

If you’re building a culture of security, it’s worth communicating that externally to your customers and shareholders. Ask your marketing and communications teams to share relevant updates (e.g. achieving SOC 2 compliance or a thought leadership article on how you approach security) in blogs and press releases. You can also have your PR team work to get your security leader in a security-related publication. 

This will not only increase your brand’s presence, it will also help build trust with your customers and investors that your company is doing everything it should be to protect its assets and data.

Staying ahead of the curve

While it does take quite a bit of work to maintain a culture of security, the benefits of doing so are various. Not only does it help increase adoption of any compliance and security measures, it also makes your business more agile in responding to any required changes or threat avoidance. This ultimately ensures that your company’s security posture is robust and comprehensive. 

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