How to navigate the Decision Maker’s Kit

We at NordLayer always strive to make your cybersecurity as easy as flicking a switch. However, we don’t believe we should stop with our product — convincing your peers about the importance of cybersecurity or its solutions can be as challenging and time-consuming.

That’s why we launched a free help tool for IT administrators and managers called the Decision Maker’s Kit. Our tool covers various supporting resources to help personnel choose providers, explain their differences, or onboard users. It includes documentation, comparisons, and other pre-made materials to make your cybersecurity journey easier.

How does the Decision Maker’s Kit work?

The Decision Maker’s Kit is a web-based tool that supports users during all stages of IT provisioning. As a huge variety of cybersecurity tools are available, IT managers can be expected to research each of their features in detail. This process is very time-consuming when the attention could be focused elsewhere. 

Therefore, the Decision Maker’s Kit is a handy solution to cut down time by preparing supplementary materials for several stages of cybersecurity technologies adoption.

Choosing

We want to help users to choose the service or solution that fits their business needs. However, this isn’t a clear-cut route. Sometimes, it will be necessary to read up on how a particular technology works. In others, you’ll need an in-depth comparison between two different providers.

Therefore, we have three main resource categories.

Solution journey — this serves as an initial evaluation of how fast you can choose and deploy a particular network and security service. The guide also includes approximations to make planning with your team easier.

Comparing solutions — this route gives a short overview of network and security solutions providing tips for practical use. You can apply various filters and compare solutions based on the most relevant aspects of your business.

Understanding terminology — even experts can benefit from brushing off their cybersecurity terminology. We categorize the terms into three categories: entry, medium, and professional. Each of them should give a detailed explanation of the cybersecurity terms that you can have at the ready.

Explanation

While cybersecurity is an important pillar of most businesses’ stability, often, it’s looked at as an expense and not a value. Frequently such a critical stance translated into underfunded IT departments and legacy systems being used, avoiding fixing things that aren’t broken. However, this is also one of the organizations’ most considerable risks. Therefore, we prepared explanatory materials to help you defend your position and provide a basis for your needs.

Business value — business managers don’t need fancy slogans, they need arguments. This is a collection of various arguments to give a full perspective on how the solution does contribute to the business and in what specific ways.

Needs identification — most operating businesses need cybersecurity solutions without knowing what they’re lacking. This interactive tool evaluates what your organization currently needs and what cybersecurity tools could benefit it.

Handling objections — people don’t like change, and every additional investment is thoroughly scrutinized. This is the nature of business, but this isn’t something that you can’t be prepared for. We prepared handy counterarguments for most common managerial objections with numbers to back your statements up.

Onboarding

Even after jumping through hoops to get the purchase confirmed and deployed, teaching your employees to use it is still trouble. While most cybersecurity providers focus entirely on network administrators, the users shouldn’t be left out of the equation. The success of the whole setup relies on whether the user base is using the newly acquired tool. However, they need to be trained to use it effectively — this is where our onboarding materials come in.

Introducing the solution — as the name suggests, it’s a guide on internally introducing new solutions. This provides several ways to introduce a new addition to employees. This should serve as a handbook when considering how to approach new deployments to your workforce.

Employee onboarding — assuming that service is intuitive enough and leaving it at that can be a huge underestimation on the provider’s part. For this reason, we want to ensure that our clients have the most detailed manuals that guide users through every step of the implementation journey, no matter their experience. This should be a huge help for administrators that could simply reuse our materials when guiding their users.

When to use NordLayer — after the tool has been rolled out and presented, it never hurts to perform its maintenance. While this shouldn’t be overdone, it does help to remind employees of its use cases and importance. For that, we’ve prepared ready-to-send email campaigns that could be copied or used as building blocks for your internal newsletters.

How does the Decision Maker’s Kit help businesses?

The Decision Maker’s Kit was built from the ground up to be as versatile as possible and fit numerous use cases. Therefore, it can be a handy support addition no matter in which stage of the cybersecurity tool adoption stage you’re in.

Businesses that are only starting to look into the market for cybersecurity solutions can use it to familiarize themselves better with what the industry has to offer. Various glossaries and explanatory materials will help them to level the playing field helping their understanding of cybersecurity in general.

On the other end of the spectrum, new NordLayer clients can profit from pre-made materials to get the message across to their staff easier. This saves network administrators time, which they can focus on elsewhere.

How to make the most of the Decision Maker’s Kit?

First and foremost, the Decision Maker’s Kit is a collection of resources. They are specifically tailored for use cases such as:

• Exploring various cybersecurity solutions
• Comparing different service providers
• Define important cybersecurity concepts
• Explain the business value of various cybersecurity tools
• Identifying existing cybersecurity needs within a company
• Justifying provisioning
• Introducing the solution for the employees
• Training employees in the use of the tool
• Reminding staff of important NordLayer’s use cases

Each use case has an in-depth section where you have either prepared materials or questionnaires to help you through and through. The tool may be useful only for one of its use cases, but it might be a helping hand throughout the acquisition process. Ultimately, this versatile tool can be creatively used to advance your cybersecurity to the next stage.