Building a Cybersecurity Culture: Tips from the Experts

Compliance sticks when people stop seeing it as a checklist and start seeing it as part of their job. At a community bank we get examined regularly, so the easy trap is treating security as something you dress up once a year for the auditors. I’ve worked hard to avoid that. The goal is that the controls hold up on a random Tuesday, not just during an exam.

A few things that have actually moved the needle for me:

I made the tools the path of least resistance. When MFA, our password manager, and single sign-on make people’s day easier instead of harder, adoption stops being a fight. Nobody rebels against something that saves them time.

I keep the training human. Instead of a canned annual video, I run phishing simulations and then talk through what happened, no shaming. When someone clicks, that’s a coaching moment, not a write-up. People who aren’t afraid to report a mistake report it fast, and speed is what actually limits damage.

I partner with the helpdesk instead of policing them. They’re the ones touching endpoints all day, so I bring them in early on patching, endpoint alerts, and access requests. When the front line feels ownership, security scales past just me.

And I try to explain the “why.” When I tell staff a control exists to protect a customer’s money and their trust, not just to satisfy a regulator, it lands differently. Culture follows meaning.

Embedding cybersecurity compliance into our culture starts with treating compliance as a business enabler, not just a regulatory hurdle. We’ve built this on three pillars: leadership buy-in, continuous education, and psychological safety.

First, leadership drives commitment from the top down. Our executives and department heads complete the same annual security training as everyone else, follow the same access controls, and discuss security openly in all-hands meetings. When employees see leadership held to the same standard, compliance becomes non-negotiable at every level.

Second, we replaced annual “check the box” training with continuous awareness: monthly scenario-based micro-modules, realistic phishing simulations paired with non-punitive, just-in-time coaching, and gamified awareness campaigns with team rewards.

Third, we simplified our policies. Instead of dense legal documents, we built a plain-language cybersecurity wiki organized by role, so employees in marketing, finance, or engineering can find exactly what applies to their work.

Fourth, we fostered a blameless reporting culture. Employees who report mistakes quickly are celebrated, not punished, and we provide anonymous channels for sensitive concerns. Fear of retribution is the biggest enemy of fast incident response, and speed of reporting determines whether an incident stays minor or becomes a breach.

Fifth, we aligned compliance with individual accountability by building it into job descriptions and performance evaluations, with department-specific metrics like certification completion or secure coding adherence tracked as shared operational KPIs.

Finally, we automate compliance and risk workflows using modern tools that continuously monitor our security posture and collect evidence in the background, reducing manual burden so compliance is woven into our technology stack rather than treated as extra busywork.

These elements reinforce each other: leadership sets the tone, education keeps it current, accessible policy makes it actionable, blameless reporting makes it safe, accountability makes it personal, and automation makes it sustainable. Together, they turn compliance into something employees simply live, not a checklist they complete once a year.

As we ground out our SOC 2 Type 2 audit last year, one Saturday morning was spent watching our voice AI harness critically fail a build pipeline multiple times. The automated policy engine was flagging a new storage bucket as not having an encryption-at-rest flag. We had 14 engineers pushing 20 deployments per day into our AWS clusters, and if compliance was just another PDF manual, that bucket would have been out in the world unencrypted.

You don’t build a security culture by asking your developers to remember a bunch of policies. You build it by writing friction into the system at the moment of decision. We baked our compliance rules right into our CI/CD pipelines: no peer security review in the PR? Build fails. Unencrypted data store? Build fails in 45 seconds.

Managers drown in compliance dashboards but are thirsty for the actual why of security breaches. Because the “why” is almost always that compliance was treated as an add-on to development instead of a compiler constraint. When the only way out is the secure way, the culture change happens on its own.

Compliance becomes culture the moment it stops being a checklist owned by one team and starts being something engineers actually experience day to day. The single most effective step I’ve seen is making the secure path the easy path — if following policy requires extra friction, people route around it under deadline pressure, no matter how good the training was.

Concretely, that means baking guardrails into the platform itself: policy-as-code checks that run automatically in CI, least-privilege access as the default rather than something requested after the fact, and paved paths that produce compliant infrastructure by default so engineers don’t have to memorize the rulebook. On top of that, a security champions model — where individual engineers on each team are trained to catch issues early and translate policy into practical guidance for their peers — does more for culture than a top-down mandate ever will, because the message comes from a colleague, not a compliance department.

The test I use: if compliance depends on people remembering a rule, it will eventually fail. If it depends on the default behavior of the system, it holds.

At Esevel, we made our largest transformation by treating cybersecurity compliance more as a cultural movement and less as an IT project. We used to think that sophisticated attacks were the primary cause of most security incidents, but the majority of incidents we experienced were due to day-to-day human error, like sharing the wrong link or staff members submitting their credentials. Most importantly, this changed how we tackled compliance.

Now, everyone in the company, including the board members, has a role. Our onboarding process includes security policy training for all staff. We conduct phishing training on a regular basis, and all devices are configured with security policies before staff receive their personal work devices. We also have designed our processes to be compliant with internationally accepted standards (ISO 27001 and 27002), which ensures compliance is built into the processes we undertake daily, as opposed to compliance being an exercise we conduct in preparation for an audit.

We view the transformation we have made, particularly of staff compliance, as the change that we are most proud of. We have empowered our workforces by instilling and nurturing the right habits, which has created a self-sustaining culture of compliance.

I’ve been building Netsurit since 1995, and today we support 300+ client organizations across regulated and security-sensitive environments. The biggest lesson: compliance becomes culture only when it is translated from regulation into daily behavior.

One step we take is to start with risk and access, not paperwork. In cloud and cyber risk assessments, we identify sensitive data, classify it, review permissions against least privilege, and map gaps to standards like HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, or ISO 27001.

Second, we treat the information security policy as a living operating tool. It applies to employees, contractors, vendors, and temporary staff, and we review it at least annually or when major systems or business operations change.

The cultural piece matters most. Netsurit’s Dreams Program reinforced my belief that people protect what they feel responsible for, so we use clear reporting and practical remediation roadmaps instead of blame.

Compliance becomes part of culture when it helps teams ship with confidence instead of slowing them down. I usually start by reframing requirements as proof that the organization can build responsibly under pressure. That matters because customers, auditors, and enterprise buyers are often testing the same thing, whether security practices are consistent when deadlines tighten and systems grow more complex.

The steps taken are intentionally operational. Engineering teams receive concise standards tied to common attack paths, not abstract policy language. High risk changes trigger early security discussion, which prevents expensive rework later. Review cycles look for patterns across findings, because repeated mistakes say more about culture than isolated bugs. Audit readiness is maintained through normal development records, giving leadership a clearer view of both risk reduction and execution discipline.

I am going to provide you a new angle to this based on our security consulting experience for last 15 years serving across the UK, US and Europe. The most contentious debate in cybersecurity is one the industry keeps having with itself: compliance is not security. It never was. Compliance is a mandate with a budget line that nobody argues about because the alternative is regulatory consequence. So there aren’t any blockers as such with this element. Proactive security is a conversation that starts with “prove the ROI” and ends with a deferred purchase order.

This difference matters more than most orgs admit. I have seen businesses with perfect audit scores breached through attack paths that no framework required them to test. The compliance programme passed. The security posture failed. Those are not the same thing. You can google yourself PCI DSS certified companies breached, or other certifications for that matter.

The reason this gap persists is a language problem as much as a budget problem. Security middle management speaks in CVEs, CVSS scores, and control frameworks. Senior executives speak in revenue protection, regulatory exposure, customer trust, and operational continuity. When a cyber security director/manager presents a threat landscape briefing to a CFO, they are often having two different conversations simultaneously and neither party realises it.

What I have seen work is pairing compliance and proactive security into a single business case rather than competing budget requests. Compliance spend is already approved; the question is what proactive capability you can anchor to it. A penetration test scoped to validate the controls your compliance programme already requires costs a fraction of a standalone security investment and produces evidence your auditors want anyway. Continuous attack surface monitoring framed as third-party risk assurance lands differently than the same tool framed as threat detection.

The language shift is equally important. Proactive security presented as reduction in unplanned incident cost, protection of customer data that underpins renewal rates, or mitigation of regulatory fines that outweigh the investment, connects directly to the KPIs executives are already measured against and is what wins your business case. Security leaders who make that translation consistently are the ones who get the budget.

Cybersecurity compliance has to be treated as a daily operating standard, not a policy that only gets attention during an audit. I’ve worked to make security everyone’s responsibility, from leadership and product teams to sales, support, and outside partners. That starts with clear expectations, regular training, role-based access, strong authentication, documented processes, and consistent accountability.

We’ve also built compliance into how decisions are made. New vendors are reviewed before they gain access to systems, sensitive data is limited to those who truly need it, and security controls are revisited as the business grows. In addition to this, we run routine assessments, test our response plans, and encourage employees to report concerns quickly without fear of blame. A strong cybersecurity culture comes from repetition, transparency, and leadership that follows the same rules it sets for everyone else.

Show me who can bypass a security rule without owning the risk, and I will show you the organisation’s real compliance culture. Compliance only becomes embedded once exceptions get governed as tightly as the rules themselves, meaning a named risk owner, a documented reason, a compensating control, an expiry date, and an actual review. Skip any of that, and a temporary workaround has a habit of turning into a permanent privilege nobody remembers approving.

A policy loses authority the moment senior people can opt out without explanation. Here’s the thing nobody puts in the compliance manual: staff watch what leadership gets away with, not what the handbook says. That’s the actual rulebook people follow. Which is why the one move that matters most is dead simple. Log the exception. Put a deadline on it. Attach a name, whether that’s a junior analyst or the CFO.

Training completion rates don’t capture any of that. A dashboard full of green checkmarks just tells you people clicked through a module before the deadline. It says nothing about what actually happens the day a deal is closing, the deadline is tomorrow, and someone senior asks for an exception. That moment, not the training record, is where you find out whether compliance is real or just something the company says it does.

To drive cybersecurity compliance cultures within companies, leadership has to view the issue of external digital integrity, rather than just the internal data-privacy mandate that it often begins as.

Many organizations put themselves at risk by having monitoring teams that only run during business hours and by following an older playbook that treats disinformation as a reputational issue, not an active cybersecurity threat. Therefore, bot detection needs to be folded into the crisis architecture as part of the compliance culture. In a recent corporate crisis I monitored, nearly half of the posts that drove a viral boycott were in fact fake accounts; 70% of them used duplicate payloads.

That manipulated attack drove a -10.5% stock price movement, or about $100 million dollars in value wiped out, in the course of days. The mature compliance cultures train their teams to work with threat intelligence companies to separate the signal from AI-generated noise, so you’re never caught making strategic business decisions or issuing apologies for bot-generated outrage.

Additionally, the culture of compliance for this tech issue also has to fold in the operationalization of trust to ensure technical verification. I highly recommend that all corporations use blockchain technology to create immutable digital signatures for all forms of official communication. When official releases get logged onto a blockchain, with immutable timestamps, stakeholders can use this verification to check your statements against AI-fabricated communications.

And a recent Zurich study makes the point that the implementation cost of these kinds of verification systems is shockingly low relative to the risk posed by unchecked AI persuasion campaigns.

But the technical system of safeguards only operates if your culture promotes real humans. As I’ve argued in my risk management POVs, identifying that conduit of authenticity is an insurance policy, an investment in a visibly trusted leader that often goes missing until there’s an incident.

When an aggressive bot campaign pops off, combining blockchain-verified facts with an authentic human can quickly correct and rebuild erroneous stakeholder interpretations much faster than the faceless official statements that fall flat with modern audiences.

I’m an online retailer, not a security specialist, but we take card details and personal data every day, so a breach would end us. That threat concentrates the mind on making security a habit rather than a policy document nobody reads.

The thing that embedded it for us was tying every security rule to a real consequence people care about, not to a compliance box. I don’t tell the team to use the password manager because a standard says so. I tell them one reused password on a staff account is how a stranger reads our customers’ order history, and that lands. When the reason is concrete and human, people follow it without being chased.

Practically, we keep the card data out of our own hands entirely by using a properly certified payment provider, so the crown jewels never sit on a laptop someone could lose. We run a short phishing test on ourselves a few times a year, and the person who clicks buys the coffees, which turns a dry lesson into a running joke that sticks.

The habit that matters most is treating near-misses as normal to report rather than shameful. About 90% of the trouble I’ve seen starts with someone too embarrassed to flag a mistake early. Make reporting cheap and blameless, and the culture does the rest.

The biggest thing we did was stop treating security as a compliance checkbox and start treating it as a product value. At Pigment, we handle sensitive psychographic and career assessment data, so security isn’t an add-on. It’s foundational to whether people trust us with their information. When the team understands that, compliance becomes a byproduct of caring about the product, not a separate obligation.

Practically, we baked security conversations into our regular development workflow instead of making it a quarterly audit. Code reviews include security considerations by default. Access controls are tight and reviewed regularly. And we made sure everyone on the team, not just engineers, understands why data protection matters to the people using our platform.

The cultural piece that actually worked was transparency about incidents and near-misses. When something goes wrong or almost goes wrong, we talk about it openly. No blame, just “here’s what happened, here’s what we learned.” That builds a team that reports issues instead of hiding them, which is worth more than any compliance training program.

My honest take: if you need a poster on the wall to remind people about security, your culture hasn’t actually internalized it yet. It should feel like an obvious part of how you build things, not a rule you follow because someone said you have to.