Games and Data protection: Gamification captures and retains participants’ attention in actions, using game elements that make them naturally motivating activities.
In this way, combining entertainment with real objectives, it is possible to improve the results of training and other educational strategies of the company — whether thinking about information security or other important topics for employees, strengthening their technical development and even their social skills.
Interestingly, the relationship between games and data protection runs even deeper. A McAfee survey, translated by the Meido Bit website in 2018, pointed out that the generation that grew up playing video games is seen as the most prepared to assume positions in cybersecurity.
After interviewing directors and professionals in the area, 78% of them believe that gamers are the strongest candidates for vacancies in Information Security — precisely because of the skills acquired in the activity.
For 72% of respondents, having professionals with this experience in their Information Technology (IT) teams would help close security gaps in their products and services. Even more — 75% would hire a professional gamer, even if he has no experience in the area, investing in specific training to complement his training later.
All this optimism is justified: for 92% of the participants in the survey, games helped this generation to develop skills that they believe are fundamental, such as competition, understanding logic, perseverance, resourcefulness in dealing with frustrations, and creativity.
Imagine being able to develop these skills in your team. Even in issues not related to information security and IT, these skills are also important to awaken the company’s employees, strengthening internal talent.
And gamification can help in this process, making training even more engaging. In addition to being a great solution for this type of action, the methodology has been adopted by companies in processes such as recruitment and selection, onboarding of new employees, internal communication, and even in employees’ daily tasks.
Three More Ways To Protect Yourself
Adding the potential of gamification to other practices makes your company even more inaccessible to these malicious attacks.
Hardware And Software Are Always Up To Date
Hardware and software updates are usually made available by system developers to fix a problem or vulnerability that cybercriminals can exploit. Therefore, maintaining outdated programs or outdated equipment opens gaps for this to happen to your company.
A simple practice that will only cost a small part of your time is to adopt a hardware and software update policy, such as updating programs used daily and the operating system; replace very old components, such as network cards, processors, or even entire computers; scan the documents with the antivirus, and check its effectiveness.
This not only increases your company’s cybersecurity but also impacts your employees’ productivity level. After all, a computer with the latest software is unlikely to crash or stop working out of nowhere. However, problems with tools have the power to influence employee motivation negatively. When you are concerned about this, the professional is more interested in working.
Up-To-Date Backup
Among the most common practices in cyber attacks is the so-called data hijacking, when the criminal blocks access to company information and devices and demands payment of an amount x to release access again. But it is common that the company never receives its data back when complying with the criminals’ demands.
In order not to run this risk, in addition to strictly following the other tips mentioned here, your data backup must be up to date. Thus, the company will protect itself from this and other incidents, such as human errors, disk failure, electrical problems, and even natural disasters.
Adopting a backup policy, as well as keeping hardware and software updated, is the ideal practice. Nowadays, technology helps in this regard with automatic backups. There is indeed a lot of information to constantly save, but always give preference to the confidential and sensitive data of your business.
Foster Continuous Learning
Promoting specific information security training is a fundamental step for your company to prevent attacks. But because it is a subject of great relevance, she must go further and constantly talk about help in this regard.
That is, it is essential that digital security is seen as a matter of continuous learning and that talking about it is part of the company’s culture, not a training course, a booklet with tips, or a one-off lecture.
Gamification helps because the company can always work on the content without getting tired. Through an online platform, its employees can learn about basic issues and increase their knowledge on the subject as they evolve in activities that can be completely playful, using a board, for example.
Also Read: Learn To Identify Flaws In Data Security
