A psychologist trying to improve cybersecurity teamwork, I often feel something of an anomaly.
In a world of hard data it’s an easy criticism to say soft skills are intangible. Yet, just because the risk I address exists on a behavioural spectrum instead of being a piece of code, it doesn’t make it less relevant in defense.
In fact, I believe, that mitigating poor teamwork plays just as important a role in defense as any SIEM, SOAR or XDR.
It's the glue that binds actions under pressure. Lacking communication, decision-making, leadership, task allocation, stress management and more - everything can fall apart.
You would, however, be hard pushed to find many security leaders who give soft skills the same priority in risk strategies. Despite innately understanding their role in helping the SOC perform better - a lack of definition, categorization and metrics too often throttle their potential.
Ultimately, because they can’t be written down, soft skills struggle to earn a place in risk mitigation.
The CREW framework
This is why our newly launched CREW framework is valuable.
For the first time, CREW brings much needed structure, clarity and metrics to soft skills in cybersecurity incident response.
By using CREW alongside a team exercise - you get a set of tools and a scoring mechanism for teamwork.
What does all this mean? It means organizations finally have a way of understanding not just if, but how well, their team communicates, solves problems, assigns roles and more when under attack.
With a concrete understanding of these factors, they can be improved over time.
Ultimately, you can put your defensive team’s soft skills on a path to maturity.
To reflect the busy environment of those running SOC teams - it has also been designed to be easy to pick up and use. We wanted to remove barriers to usage.
Imagine all the specialist technical skills you have either acquired or painstakingly developed, knitted together with continually improving soft skills. Teamwork as a force multiplier. This is what we hope CREW can help achieve.
To try it out - get your free copy of the framework at rangeforce.com/crew or watch our webinar here