Making our employees cyber savvy in the new normal

Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog

As a global leader in the digital industry, Capgemini takes its responsibilities seriously. We are committed to creating a trusted environment across our ecosystem, including clients, third parties, and authorities. Since 2020, we have entered a new normal – moving to a hybrid working model full of new possibilities and, inevitably, new risks. Cybersecurity incidents have peaked during this time, exposing us all to a veritable storm of threats – but we remain steadfast in our resolve to meet these challenges head on.

In this spirit, Capgemini has embraced and adopted October as the internationally recognized Cybersecurity Awareness Month to promote and emphasize the vital role that cybersecurity plays in our increasingly digital world. We believe that a complete understanding of our cybersecurity model by all employees will propagate an increasingly valuable yet elusive asset: trust.

This October, we are raising awareness about how remote work – driven by mobility technologies, social networks, clouds and SaaS models, distributed DevOps, etc. – inevitably exposes us to cyber risks.

The pandemic has not only caused an increase in malicious parties (individuals, organizations, or even states) mounting sophisticated and targeted attacks. It has also had a huge impact on our employees and clients across sectors and countries. Consequently, Capgemini set up prevention and protection measures and is constantly monitoring the decisions and recommendations of local public authorities for their implementation.

Through proper planning, timely execution, and leveraging its internal investment in technology, Capgemini was among the first in the industry to massively deploy work-from-home measures across its operations worldwide. Our IT department, supported by Group cybersecurity teams, deployed a “work from home” plan to work securely and monitor endpoints, both connected (VPN) or not (internet) to our network. As a result, nearly 95% of employees can now work remotely and securely.

Employee communication and training efforts have also been expanded to underscore the best security practices when working from home: we call it acculturation. We aim to develop a cyber culture internally by insisting on incident reporting and leveraging publicly available information on cyberattacks and threats arising in the market based on our threat intelligence service.

We believe our employees are our first line of defense. Our teams must act as ambassadors in building attitudes that promote the appropriate use and protection of information assets. In order to do so, we have implemented mandatory e-learning modules and created an internal site dedicated to cyber knowledge. We also regularly conduct phishing campaigns preceded by awareness campaigns and organize regular webinars to specific audiences. Thus, an annual cyber culture challenge is organized to reward the best specific programs across the units.

During this Cybersecurity Month, we will continue to organize appropriate baseline communications and awareness activities to ensure that all employees understand the risks and their role in protecting Capgemini, our clients, and themselves. Internally, a global awareness campaign “Be cyber savvy in the new normal,” is being conducted to strengthen our cyber culture.

To emphasize the vital role cybersecurity plays in today’s increasingly digital world and the work that Capgemini has been doing in this space, we will also roll out a cyber-awareness global campaign in the first week of October. “Do Your Part. #BeCyberSmart” is the key theme for this month-long campaign. We will promote it through blogs, points of view, and security roundtables with industry thought leaders, analysts, and our Capgemini experts.

Some interesting topics that we will cover include:

AI in cybersecurity: Not an ethical dilemma
Can AI save the security operations center?
Mastering the critical art of cybersecurity in auto
Cyber wars of MATANGI
Winning security leadership culture and metrics that matter, featuring Forrester Research

For further reading: The 4 dimensions of cyber culture.