Would turning your organization’s cybersecurity planning into a tabletop game make things more interesting and possibly exciting?
That’s the hope of A.J. Leece, founder of Brekade, a Calgary-based company that provides business resiliency training with custom-built video games.
Leece said that businesses often have numerous technical gaps that they aren’t aware of. With organizations so tech-enabled, it makes the revenue-generating side of the business more vulnerable to attack.
“Your attackers aren’t going to wait for you to figure out that you have this problem, and if they exploit it, and it hits you long enough, it can shut you down,” he said.
“Business resiliency is the ability to weather those events, to be prepared for them and then to come out a little bit more strengthened on the other side.”
He said Brekade’s concept was born out of a desire to make a typical tabletop exercise more accessible and, ultimately, fun. Leece said that a typical exercise might include sitting in a boardroom with a bunch of executives and telling them that the millions they’re spending on information security just doesn’t cut it.
“I just simply migrated into, ‘this is how the technology underpins your important parts of the business.’ Here are some of the systemic changes you can make inside your business that you can manage,” Leece said.
“While we’re at it, you have a lot of fun and you actually get the whole truth of what the business is about, because the play now abstracts us away from the business far enough that we can get the real answers.”
It was an experience with students at SAIT where he was always trying to gauge his success by keeping pupils engaged. One of the students suggested a tabletop exercise, and they located a bag of D20s (Dungeons and Dragons 20-sided dice) to have a little bit of fun.
He was able to cover six important points of information security and realized he might be on to something.
The games and beyond
The current games cover the causes of incidents and their remediation. Leece takes in the information he needs about a company and turns it into a conceptual layer that underpins the game.
“Here will be a bit of an indicator of this is the problem, and they have to use their internal processes, the tooling, the skills that are available and figure it out collaboratively, the way they would as a business,” he said.
“Or, if the business is exploring this opportunity and they want to evaluate kind of where to put those resources, I give them a fictionalized representation of their business that has all the people, process and technology under the hood to secure the revenue-generating parts of the business. So now they get a chance to see, OK, well, we can put our money right there.”
Leece joined the Alberta Catalyzer – Velocity program because he had a lot of abstract pieces to the business that had to be pulled together. He had different marketing pieces, a website and services, but putting together the right business formula was a challenge.
“This really has cleared just so much of that confusion and really got rid of a lot of the fog on the horizon that’s keeping me from finding the land,” he said.
“The reality is, if you don’t have somebody who can see your business from the outside, you’re always going to be stuck in this kind of tunnel vision problem, and I really had that.”
He said his main goal with Brekade is to ensure that companies have affordable access to security training for their systems. One attack could cripple a small or medium-sized company.
“It’s time to do something about it. I’m confident that I can confront this, and it’s just about bringing this to be accessible,” Leece said.
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