The ROI of KnowBe4’s Security Awareness Training Platform

KnowBe4's Founder and CEO, Stu Sjouwerman, started KnowBe4 to help IT teams manage social engineering.

In a recent blog, Stu shared the findings from Forrester's Total Economic Impact of KnowBe4 report. Many businesses are unsure whether to assign budgets to security training platforms, so below we summarise the ROI of security training and specifically KnowBe4. This will be useful for you to use when pitching KnowBe4 to your C-Level, managers and business owners who sign off software, cyber security budget and processes.

The key findings

Social engineering is increasing

One of your important responsibilities is to prevent data breaches and minimise downtime. A single successful cyber attack can affect several things - revenue, expenses, cash flow, brand perception, and loyalty.

With that in mind, it's horrifying to learn that the global estimated cost of cybercrime is forecast to go up by almost 70% in the next five years. Phishing is responsible for two-thirds of ransomware attacks and data breaches, making your workforce the largest cybersecurity risk. Research by Verizon's DBIR shows that the human element is involved in 74% of data breaches and that 91% of attacks begin with a spear-phishing attack.

Scary stats, right? And all the more reason to equip your workforce with effective security awareness training to enable them to make smarter decisions and reduce the risk of phishing attacks.

The risk of doing nothing or implementing the training yourself

Implementing a solution like KnowBe4 mitigates risk. In 2023, the average cost of a data breach was a whopping $4.45 million, which includes:

• Time lost remediating a cyber incident or full breach - can be pricey when from third-party providers
• Business downtime
• Financial losses from stolen funds, ransom payments and fraud
• Loss of intellectual property
• Increased cyber security insurance premiums
• Potential data regulation non-compliance fines

You have to also consider the time, people and resources researching, planning, implementing, updating and managing your own security awareness training in-house.

Now you know some of the reasons to consider investing in a cyber security training platform, take a look at why you should specifically choose KnowBe4...

KnowBe4 use case

Over 65,000 organisations globally, including us here at Grey Matter, use KnowBe4 to train staff on security awareness to reduce successful phishing attempts.

One organisation found the following ROI and benefits from using KnowBe4's security awareness training platform:

1. A three-year ROI of 276% with payback in less than 3 months.
2. $432.3K reduction in risk exposure over three years by building a stronger security posture via awareness training and simulated phishing testing.
3. $411.3K cost avoidance by a reduction in email alert investigations and response costs due to employee proactive threat response.
4. $164.2K cost avoidance from leveraging KnowBe4’s 35-language security training library and simulated phishing instead of in-house programmes.
5. Avoided cost increases in cyber insurance due to reducing outages caused by security incidents.

As you can see, there were plenty of cost savings, productivity gains and business benefits.

Find out more about KnowBe4

You can learn more about KnowBe4 here.

If you have any questions, you can contact our dedicated cyber security licensing team who can arrange demos and provide more details about the costs, features and benefits of KnowBe4.