The Total Economic Impact™ Of KnowBe4
Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By The KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training & Simulated Phishing And PhishER Platforms
Executive summary
Anti-phishing training and simulation platforms educate users to recognise and avoid phishing emails that use social engineering to compromise targets. KnowBe4 trains and tests employees using the most current real-world scenarios as part of an ongoing program, enabling organizations to build strong human shields against cybercrime. In addition to taking the load of creating effective cybersecurity training and phishing simulation programs off the shoulders of security teams, KnowBe4’s PhishER reliably automates the most time consuming steps involved in daily user-reported email alert response and mitigation.
KnowBe4 commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying the KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training & Simulated Phishing and PhishER platforms. The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of KnowBe4 on their organizations.
KnowBe4 is an integrated platform for security awareness training combined with simulated phishing attacks. PhishER is KnowBe4’s lightweight security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform, which allows incident response teams to manage high volumes of potentially malicious email messages that users report, and it enables them to respond to the most dangerous threats more quickly and more efficiently.
To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed the IT security awareness program manager at a global chemical manufacturing company with more than 10,000 computer users. Forrester used this testimony to create a three-year financial analysis.
In the year prior to implementing the KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training & Simulated Phishing platform, the organization experienced various security breaches. One breach prompted a five-day manufacturing plant shutdown, while another led to a two-day malware-caused production outage in one of its labs. Also, the organization’s accounts payable department kept receiving fraudulent invoices on behalf of vendors that have been compromised and one of the organization’s executives became the target of a phishing attack. Decision-makers wanted to tackle the problem right where they saw that most threats could be shielded off — at the user level — by instituting a cybersecurity awareness program that would sustainably improve the organization’s overall security posture.
Since investing in KnowBe4 three years ago and rolling out initial baselining and ongoing training to its global user base, the organization’s Phish-Prone Percentage (KnowBe4’s failure indicator of users who click on phishing emails) has dropped from 19.2% to 2.8%, and the organization has not experienced cybersecurity incident-related outages or plant shutdowns on the scale that it previously did.