When Business Meets Security: Breaking Down the Language Barrier
Imagine you're a HR manager suddenly thrust into managing your organisation's cybersecurity crisis. The IT team speaks in acronyms, the board demands answers in business terms, and you're caught in the middle, trying to translate between two worlds. Sound familiar? You're not alone.
This scenario plays out in organisations worldwide as incident response teams are not just made up solely of your IT team but might include many members of the wider organisation who all have a role to play. While this might sound daunting, the good news is you don't need to become a technical expert to effectively support your organisation's cybersecurity efforts.
What will help you is a solid understanding of some key fundamental cybersecurity concepts, whether it’s bridging the communication gap, making informed decisions or building a security-first culture through awareness training programs.
Understanding Your Role in the Security Ecosystem
It's Not About Rolling Out Policies
Contrary to common misconceptions, if you're in HR, you're typically not responsible for implementing security policies directly but you may influence them indirectly, especially when it comes to what could be considered extremely important areas like:
Security Awareness Training: This is how you build the first line of defence for your organisation, the human defence. The importance of ongoing cybersecurity awareness training can’t be overstated. Providing everyone in the organisation with regular training helps build resilience and gives them the ability to recognise threats and understand what they should do.
Skills Investment: In larger enterprises, learning and development teams or department managers typically handle the technical aspects of security implementation. Your job is to facilitate, not to configure firewalls. It’s important to work with key stakeholders within these teams to ensure the training investment will deliver the outcomes to help the organisation meet their security objectives.
The Foundation: What is Cybersecurity About?
CIA: The most well-known acronym in cybersecurity
At the heart of cybersecurity lies what’s often referred to as the CIA triad, not the intelligence agency, but an acronym that represents the three pillars of information security:
Confidentiality: Ensures that sensitive information is accessed only by authorised individuals
Integrity: Making sure data remains accurate and unaltered, protecting it from unauthorised modifications
Availability: Providing timely and reliable access to and use of information.
Here's the critical insight, these three elements are interconnected. A breach in one area often compromises the others. If a threat actor accesses confidential data (breaking confidentiality), they might alter it (compromising integrity) or lock you out entirely (destroying availability).
Non-Repudiation: Creating Undeniable Proof of Digital Actions
Non-repudiation ensures that a person can’t deny performing a digital action, like sending a message, approving a transaction, or modifying data. It works by creating a secure, verifiable trail of evidence (often using cryptographic signatures and tamper-resistant logs) that proves:
Who performed the action
What they did
When they did it
This becomes essential during investigations, audits, or disputes because it provides trustworthy proof that can’t easily be altered or contested.
Risk Management: Making Business-Savvy Security Decisions
The Broken Door Lock Analogy
Understanding risk management doesn't require a technical degree. Think of it like a broken door lock. You need to identify what the risk is to leave the door unsecured and then decide whether to:
Fix it immediately (mitigate the risk) or
Accept that someone might walk in (accept the risk)
Your decision depends on:
Probability: How likely is someone to try the door?
Impact: What's the potential damage if they get in?
Cost: What's the expense of each option versus potential losses?
Risk management is just thinking ahead about what could go wrong and making plans to stop it. In IT, it helps make sure systems are safe, reliable, and protect employee information.
For HR, this matters because:
It keeps employee data secure
It helps systems keep running smoothly
It ensures the company follows rules and laws
It makes work easier and safer for everyone
Think of it like checking a building for fire hazards before anyone moves in, it’s about trying to prevent problems before they happen.
The Three Pillars of Security Controls
1. Technical Controls
These are tools like firewalls, antivirus, and other security software. You don't need to understand how they work, just that they exist and need regular updates to keep systems safe.
2. Administrative Controls
This is where HR plays a key role. It’s about making sure the right rules are in place and followed, such as:
Maintaining onboarding checklists in line with security policies
Implementing segregation of duties (splitting payment and authorisation roles)
Giving employees access to only what they need to do their job.
3. Physical Controls
Security isn’t just digital. Door locks, access badges, visitor logs, and restricted areas all keep people and information safe.
Building a Security-Conscious Culture
Security awareness training isn't just another compliance checkbox, it's about building organisational resilience. Effective training starts with understanding who you’re speaking to. Cyber awareness efforts should be tailored to different job functions, digital literacy levels, and generational tech comfort.
Creating more engaging and human-focused cybersecurity training can significantly strengthen your organisation’s security posture.
Moving beyond the standard yearly tick-box exercises, the real impact comes from making cyber awareness a practical, everyday part of people’s roles.
When training is relevant, personal and built around real behaviours, it sticks, and that’s what truly builds resilience.
Beyond theory, you’ll also see how awareness can lead to meaningful action, through well-designed phishing simulations, accessible explanations of tools like password managers and two-factor authentication, and tips for at-home cyber hygiene that reinforce good habits everywhere.
So what’s next? How can you build your own knowledge around cybersecurity practices?
Start with Fundamentals: Consider foundational courses like the ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity. This course is ideal for individuals without direct IT experience and covers foundational knowledge, skills and abilities within the cybersecurity domain.
Focus on Your Domain: What training is going to help you be better as a HR Manager? There’s many digital courses to help you understand laws and regulations around privacy and security that may be beneficial. Why not start with our self-paced Cyber Risk for your Business course?
Practice Scenario Planning: Do you know what your role is if your company experiences a breach? Participate in any tabletop exercises which help you know your role and responsibilities in the event of an incident.
Stay Informed: Subscribe to non-technical security newsletters and alerts
Ready to Build Your Team's Security Capabilities? Let us help you.
Understanding cybersecurity fundamentals is just the first step. Whether you're looking to implement security awareness training, develop your team's capabilities, or align your processes with security best practices, the right training can make all the difference and that’s where Lumify Work can help.
Lumify works with organisations all the time, helping to align the right training solutions with their objectives. From all staff cyber awareness training programs through to audits and compliance training, executive and board level cybersecurity workshops through to red and blue team training, Lumify can help you. Learn more about why we are your no. 1 cyber security training provider.
