The need for perpetual change characterizes cybersecurity more than any other sector.
Not so long ago, to most organizations, cyber skills were limited to technical teams remediating laptops and changing passwords. Fast forward a few years, and cyber knowledge, skills and capabilities are in huge demand across entire organizations.
Not only do security teams need continual upskilling, but developers require ongoing education to code securely, People teams need to hire the right talent in the face of ever-changing requirements, and everyone from the CEO to PR and legal teams must be primed to respond effectively to ever more likely cyber incidents and crises.
In essence, as cyber risk permeates across entire organizations and even whole sectors, it creates a need for skills and judgment in both technical and non-technical teams in a way that keeps pace with attackers and ensures compliance.
It is because of the burden this puts on skills that we are today announcing a Series C investment of $75m.
Led by new investors Insight Partners, alongside Menlo Ventures, and Citi Ventures with existing investor Goldman Sachs Asset Management, the capital will be used to enhance our platform so it can intelligently match this spreading threat using targeted training to deliver knowledge, skills and judgment.
As a company, we have always believed people have the potential to make just as big of an impact as technical countermeasures in reducing cyber risk. I would rather have a skilled team capable of making nuanced decisions, thinking laterally, instilling culture and showing leadership than a whole slew of resource-intensive technical countermeasures.
This is where our newly evolved platform will pay dividends. The investment will allow it to evolve to continually measure workforce cyber capabilities across the entire organization, map them to risk and optimize skills and decision-making in line with a security strategy for the first time.
We believe an updated picture of where skills strengths and weaknesses lie across the entire organization is crucial for achieving increased resilience.
This is because security doesn’t live on paper. With Immersive Labs, you get a current view of application development, cloud operations, legal, communications and executive team capabilities. Closer to home, we help you understand where skills are strong – and weak – in the security team and deliver instant targeted training to address any issues, as well as enabling retention and rewards based on capability not tenure.
Reducing the impact of cyber risk is becoming an organization-wide responsibility. For this to take root, CISOs need an ongoing programme of targeted training and exercising backed up with metrics to show continual improvement and benchmarked against peers.
By doing this, we build on an approach already helping some of the world’s largest companies to increase resilience through improved capabilities and better decision-making. With over 100% YoY growth, more than 200 people in major territories worldwide, and modules changing the way Security, Development, People and Talent, Communications, Legal and Executive teams harness cyber skills, we hope to keep growing and help even more organizations unlock the potential of their workforce.
Too often, the human factor is named the weakest link in cyber defense. We believe we can turn this on its head by helping organizations harness the power of their entire workforce to stand prepared for every threat.
James Hadley,
CEO and Founder, Immersive Labs