Cybersecurity awareness workshops

We offer cybersecurity workshops that enable your organisation to develop a profound understanding of the cybersecurity issues it faces, both in terms of security and of privacy. The goal of the workshops is to facilitate your organisation’s identification and description of its most critical assets and their cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This includes the socio-technical relationships within the organisation, in terms of information flows between those critical assets. We facilitate and enable your analysis of the entire socio-technical infrastructure of your organisation, ranging from human interactions with the business processes, down to technical details relating to the transfer, processing and storage of the data implicit in those business processes.

In the workshops we combine the organisation-specific knowledge of your people and decision makers, with the thought-leading socio-technical and cybersecurity expertise of our highly experienced analysts. We will enable you to develop a holistic picture of the cybersecurity situation and associated vulnerabilities, in your organisation, and help you to formulate actions to mitigate any potential downside effects.

Expected Workshop Results

Cybersecurity awareness training specific to your organisational needs
A knowledge repository of organisational assets and their dependencies in terms of cybersecurity
A dynamic visual representation of the knowledge graph, to be easily adapted following organisational changes

Optionally we offer the ability to model the identified assets and dependencies in a cloud based service, which gives you the ability to utilise the knowledge repository in a dynamic way and adapt organisational changes in real-time. This includes monitoring of threat intelligence and social media for cybersecurity issues that relate to the assets modelled in your organisation, and alerts for identified issues.

Strengths and advantages of the approach

No paper exercise, active and persistent transfer of knowledge between workshop participants
We enable your organisation to harvest, codify and understand the tacit, (and sometimes abstract) knowledge of your staff – the knowledge they have that isn’t written in manuals and user guides
Generates lasting awareness of cybersecurity within your organisation, helping your employees to adapt the most fitting mitigation measures to future incidents
The collaborative nature of the workshops facilitates a paradigm shift in cybersecurity responsibilities. Cybersecurity is not seen any more as an IT department problem, but an organisational problem
Provides the deep understanding of the cybersecurity situation in your organisation required to ensure legal compliance to legal and regulatory measures, like the European Network and Information Security (NIS) directive or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
Optionally: Dynamic visualisation of asset and dependency knowledge repository, and real-time monitoring of threat intelligence and social media for cybersecurity issues relating to your organisational assets.

Testimonials

Through Collaboration we became more aware

To deal with the workshop’s organisation we appointed a project manager and set up a very heterogeneous working group. Colleagues with specific skills in terms of security were brought together with colleagues with skills related to cooperation, IT skills, skills related to the management of economic resources. The workshop participants therefore included people with a wide variety of skills and competences, all within our Municipality. In addition, given the structural and organisational complexity of the municipal context, the participation of other staff inside and outside the municipality was sometimes required, on the basis of issues and needs that gradually arose. It is important to point out that during the workshops we experienced various kinds of complexity: from administrative to technical, from organisational to cultural. Bringing together this variety of people from various departments, including people from external service providers, for collaboration, already was enlightening: we discovered, perhaps for the first time, the complexity and interdependencies of our systems. By this collaborative set-up, we shared information, which made us uncover a lot of hidden information, and we were able to assemble together a holistic picture of the different parts in our IT-setup, and how these parts work together. This awareness made us change our perception of cybersecurity in our municipality, and we started thinking on how to manage such a change.

Technology manager, Municipality of Rome

Through collaboration and awareness we discovered our weak points

From the very beginning of the CS-AWARE workshops in our municipality, the initial task was to identify the persons to be involved from technical, users and managers perspective. All of them were key players to the development, implementation and support of cybersecurity in the context of our organisation. After the work group was established, roles were assigned and the process could start. The workshop sessions were used for identifying the critical and sensitive points that the system should care about. Although the IT departments had deep knowledge about their infrastructure and software, never before were they triggered to spot the weak and sensitive points. Therefore, the workshops proved very useful and training-like for the IT. The whole process changed the point of view of IT employees in our municipality, and created an improved security perspective about their systems. The CS-AWARE experts were in direct exchange with the IT personnel and influenced towards raising the security awareness in our municipality. The collaboration between our municipality and the technical experts and security consultants was constructive and went both ways; both sides benefited from this workshop, resulting in a better focused approach to cybersecurity specific for our municipality.

IT administrator, Municipality of Rome

The workshops increased our understanding of cybersecurity

This way of collaboration forced all of us, each for her/his part, to make an effort to identify elements that sometimes seemed obvious but actually are not. Furthermore, during workshops – when each contact person illustrated the part of her/his competence – different participants had the opportunity to listen and understand descriptions of activities, processes, area’s difficulties different from their own getting an opportunity to know better the internal structure of the administration. Having such an overview will surely facilitate each of us in carrying out daily activities, asking critical questions, such as: How does a denial service attack may impact our organisation? Or: How can we build effective knowledge management for collecting and comparing social media reports about new threats?

The Larissa team

Pricing

The CS-AWARE system is bespoke. It is carefully and precisely crafted, to meet the unique requirements of each client organisation. Your organisation’s network infrastructure, hardware and software applications, and the interdependencies between these components are analysed in a workshop setting. The workshop environment is a collaborative partnership between your people and our experts. The workshop(s) facilitate and develop your deep understanding of your organisation’s ICT systems. System interdependencies are identified and explored, cybersecurity vulnerabilities are revealed, and network nodes, where traffic can be surveilled and anomalous events can be detected in real-time are identified.
It follows that the cost of the CS-AWARE solution is dependent on the size and complexity of your organisation and its ICT systems. We would welcome the opportunity to meet with you in a conference call to help us to understand your organisation’s needs, and subsequently, to enable us to formulate a value proposition for your consideration.

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