Item: KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As everyone knows, email security is volatile and a common way for risks to enter a company. Security awareness training is one of the best ways to educate your users and keep them on alert for suspicious emails and things that don't look right. This tool helps us to train our users to be better at spotting the signs of bad emails, report them more frequently, and experience less clicks and compromises. It also allows us to see our company posture by reporting on failure rates of phishing simulations, as well as helps remediate issues by using PhishER.

Pros and Cons

PhishER allows our admins to quickly delete emails from remote mailboxes when the emails are reported.
The simulations are well designed and configuring the campaigns is easy.

Reporting clicks occasionally is incorrect - where the security system in place sandboxes an email and counts it as a click or sometimes other click reports that are still a mystery why they occur.

Return on Investment

When using Microsoft365 Defender as your email protection, KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training sometimes makes it easier and quicker to remediate and protect against true phishing attacks than using the M365 tools.
Phishing and training our users has minimized the incidents where employees click on links, attachments and enter passwords into real attacks.
Occasional training and random simulations has kept security at the forefront of many user's minds.

Alternatives Considered

Proofpoint Security Awareness Training

KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training has a better platform for SAT than Proofpoint SAT and the templates are great. I compared these in 2020-2021, around the time when it was called Wombat. One nice thing that Proofpoint's SAT had is that if you also had their email security platform, it would integrate nicely.

Key Insights

Do you think KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training's feature set?

Yes

Did KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training again?

Yes

KnowBe4 Training Content

Fresh content is obviously better than old and outdated content. I demo'd one platform that used content from years ago and while it could still help, it was not the most effective type of training content. Attacks change frequently, so every year (or few months) brings new, and old, attacks and attack vectors. Keeping our employees up to date on the latest attack methods is much more effective than years-old content that may not ever surface in our environment.

KnowBe4 User Management

We provision our users through SCIM provisioning with Azure Active Directory. We used to use ADI Sync with Active Directory, but moved to Azure to have better control on the users being synced. It also meant that we would have less sync interruptions and service errors since migrating away from ADI Sync on a virtual server to the SCIM provisioning in Azure AD. Migrating from one to the other took a little bit of time and Excel work to compare the differences in user syncs and correct any issues before going live, but KnowBe4 has a great feature where you can put the sync in test mode to find out what would happen if it was live. Very helpful!

KnowBe4 Reporting

It is important to know how many users are clicking emails in the phishing simulation campaigns, what types of campaigns are more successful, and whether or not training is being completed. Over time, the % failure rate of those who clicked is a very helpful way to gauge progress in the individual users and the company as a whole.

Likelihood to Recommend

KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training is great to use on executives, sales team, marketing and other positions and roles that constantly communicate externally and may receive a lot of spam. In my experience, even if a member of one of these areas fell for a real phishing email, they don't always learn from it. Being required to take some training because they fell for a phishing simulation is great because it is something they don't want to have to take (the training) and makes them less likely to click away on the next email. I would not use this product to phish your employees with emails that look like legit emails from legit coworkers. While it can be a good test, employees end up more likely to report legit emails from HR and cause them to be blocked across the organization.

Training Content

The training is quick and to the point, clear, and often pauses to quiz the viewer on what they've just watched. This forces people to pay attention to the videos. It also has interaction sections that require you to click around to discover the info, then are quizzed. I think this helps a lot because users need to focus and answer correctly rather than just speed past it. Our failure rates have gone down over the months, so the training must be working.
The scenarios are also more real life and potential than other systems and videos I've watched.

Value of Centralized Services

Combining data points into one source is always a big benefit. So this is extremely helpful and insightful. Plus, we can compare the corresponding data that matches what we see to get a better picture.
I am a big proponent of consolidating platforms into one where possible, not just for ease of management, analytics, and configuration benefits, but also because users are more likely to do training if it is in one place vs many - this includes myself.

Cost

I think the price is fair for KnowBe4 Compliance Plus. It is definitely good value for the price, but sometimes you won't know what that value is until you experience it. I think potential buyers would be more likely to favor it than not. KnowBe4 is at the top for a reason.

I gave this answer because I think the product is a solid and worthy product to have and the price is a fair price to pay. It is not budget-breaking, but also not inexpensive. But it is worth it in the grand scheme.

Cost Comparison

I can't speak for most vendors and pricing changes frequently over the years and also based on a number of factors, such as other features, products, and services purchased along side the product vs just the one product. Discounts can be applied differently at different times of the year. But overall, I think it is a competitive price, especially being in the top of security and compliance awareness and training platforms.

User Provisioning

We used to use ADI Sync with native Active Directory, but migrated to SCIM provisioning to enhance our syncing and control the unnecessary accounts that were getting sucked into the system with ADI Sync. This minimizes the number of account merges and makes it easier to manage the user sync.
We have not turned on SSO/SAML yet, but will be in the future.

AI-Driven Phishing & Training

Based on the phishing simulation failures, specific training can be assigned to the user who fell for the simulation and interacted incorrectly on the email. The training automatically gets assigned, which reinforces the importance of paying attention to all kinds of emails, and is related to the type of email simulation that was clicked.

Usability

KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training is simple to use, simple to administer, effective, with quality content. It is easy to take the training and we have the reminders set so that the longer a user puts the training off, the more frequently they will receive reminder emails. Eventually they get emailed every day until they take the training. But with a simple click, they can get into the training content.

Security Awareness Training with PhishER

We also use PhishER's capabilities to allow our security team to pull identified malicious emails out of other mailboxes who may or may not have reported or even seen the email so no further damage can be done. It can also be automated. And if a large number of people report an email, it will automatically pull that email from all mailboxes before security / IT has a chance to perform an action on it - which can be a blessing or a pain. We have had malicious emails that were automatically pulled quickly, which may have saved us from a real attack, but also had legit company emails that got pulled because too many people reported it and we had to reinstate those emails.

Users and Roles

1300 - Everyone in our organization uses KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training. It is required to take security and compliance training when they first start the job, but also semi-annual training, and repeat failures result in a user being assigned more training. So really we put people through a lot of training on security and compliance, especially around phishing.

Support Headcount Required

3 - Our security team and myself (system admin) support the KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training platform. The security team understands how to build phishing simulations, create groups, assign simulations to the groups and schedule them. They also know how to react and remediate issues from KnowBe4's portal that arise with malicious emails.

I am involved with any configuration setup or troubleshooting around user provisioning, domains, and integrations.

Business Processes Supported

It helps people realize that they need to be more careful with email and security
It gives our users experience in safely identifying malicious emails so that are more likely to recognize the real phishing emails
It allows us as admins to more quickly remediate malicious emails sent to a group of people
It gives us insight on how often our users are failing simulations and who the repeat users are so we can put them on a "watch list"

KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training is a must have for any org

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training