Acronis takes security awareness training in a new direction

Acronis has launched Security Awareness Training that users won’t dread. The new offering is designed to be more fun, engaging and effective than most other training modules available.

Acronis Security Awareness Training runs on a multitenant architecture designed to make setup and administration easy, so MSPs won’t have to spend hours managing and delivering training. The new Acronis offering also delivers phishing simulations that closely imitate real-life, socially engineered attacks.

Security awareness training is a necessity for organizations, with human error causing 68% of all data breaches, according to the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. And it can be effective, as the Verizon report demonstrates. In 2022, the Verizon report found that the human element was present in 82% of breaches worldwide. In 2023, the number dropped to 74%. It dropped again in 2024.

But security training has always had major flaws. It tends to be tedious and boring, and many users glide through it without paying much attention. It’s also not necessarily clear. The National Cybersecurity Alliance recently found that 40% of users find online security information confusing, and 37% feel overwhelmed by security advice.

One of the biggest problems with security awareness training as it exists now is that it gets old quickly. Not only can information be out of date, but the experience itself feels stale and causes users to disengage. Some vendors reuse security courses over a period of two or three years. Users can actually end up either seeing the same content more than once or watching something that feels the same as what they’ve already seen.

Acronis Security Awareness Training takes an entirely different approach, delivering an offering focused on keeping users not just awake but fully engaged. Acronis frequently updates training modules so that users always have the latest information and don’t get bogged down in repetitive courses. Frequent updates lead to greater engagement.

Designed using digestible, short courses, Acronis Security Awareness Training educates employees to recognize and avoid phishing attempts but also makes learning about security fun. With the boredom and drudgery removed from training, you can ensure course completion, reduced security incidents and simplified support to MSPs and their clients.

And engaging training content is more important now than ever. The National Cybersecurity Alliance also found in 2023 that Generation Z and the millennials — basically, people younger than 45 — were twice as likely as older users to disagree with the idea that security is worth the effort. That doesn’t speak particularly well for existing security training given that younger users generally have more access to security training.

That’s  a big problem at a time when cyberattacks remain rampant and the large majority of them are still due to human error. Acronis Threat Research Unit found that email attacks surged by 293% year over year in the first half of 2024. In H1 2024, an astonishing 1.5% of all email received contained malware or phishing links. The growth of generative AI is helping cybercriminals devise both more and more effective attacks.

Security awareness training is critical for preventing what can be costly data breaches; Verizon reports that the median cost of a breach is $46,000 — enough to have a significantly negative impact on a small or medium-sized business. But there’s more to training than just preventing breaches.

Compliance with many regulations, including SOC 2, PCI DSS, GDPR and HIPAA, now requires some form of security training. Failure to comply with regulations can quickly get expensive. For instance, fines for failing to comply with GDPR can total up to €10 million, or up to 2% of a business’s entire global annual turnover, whichever is higher. That’s not even the fine for severe compliance failures. In severe cases, fines can rise as high as €20 million or 4% of annual turnover.

And then there is cyber insurance, a critical investment for MSPs and their clients. Many cyber insurance policies now require proof of security awareness training. The same is true for many vendors that require businesses to offer training before they can become part of a supply chain.

With threats to clients’ operations as well as their own always increasing, MSPs can’t afford to get security awareness training wrong. Fortunately, Acronis Security Awareness Training stands out from existing offerings. It’s built to:

• Deliver drastically increased user satisfaction with an easy-to-use, intuitive interface, as well as easy-to-digest training sessions that cover a wide variety of topics.
• Gamify phishing exercises that train employees on how to respond to risks within suspicious emails.
  
• Simulate phishing in a way that that mimics real-life social engineering.
  
• Feature frequent updates so course material and experiences stay fresh.
  

For businesses, Acronis Security Awareness Training delivers more engaging and more effective training designed to improve users’ security behavior. For MSPs, it represents several important opportunities.

Delivering awareness training has traditionally been difficult for MSPs because of the demands of managing a large number of users at client sites. Onboarding, management and updating courses are constant and expensive chores. All of that leads to high total cost of ownership and costly deployments with limited payment flexibility.

• Increase revenue: Generate high-margin, repeatable revenue with no upfront costs.
• Save time and reduce costs: Manage training and phishing simulations for multiple clients with an MSP-friendly learning management system (LMS) and templates for performing bulk operations, tracking progress and generating reports.
• Enhance client security, trust and loyalty: Deliver short and memorable training with high completion rates that will lead to happier clients and users.
• Streamline deployment and billing: Easily deploy training and configure billing via the Acronis multitenant platform.
  
• Easily manage a complete Microsoft 365 security solution: Centrally manage security awareness training, email archiving, backup, email security and collaboration app security for all clients in one place.  
  

Security awareness training doesn’t have to be boring and difficult to manage. Acronis takes training in a whole new direction, one that will deliver results for MSPs and clients alike.