Your First Few Weeks With AwareNex: What to Expect

Before bringing in an outside partner, there’s a fair question to ask: will this actually take work off our plate, or give us another relationship to manage?

Your team may already have a training platform, phishing software, and a list of awareness topics for the year. Still, someone has to write the communications, prepare the campaigns, get approvals, review results, and work out what employees need next.

That work adds up. When something urgent comes along, awareness is often the thing that gets moved to next week.

AwareNex helps with that part.

Our managed cybersecurity awareness services give your organization dedicated support for planning and running its awareness program. You work with an advisor backed by specialists, while your internal team keeps control of the direction and approvals.

Here’s how those first few weeks can take shape. The pace will depend on the service you choose, what you already have in place, and how quickly access and approvals can be arranged.

We Start With What’s Happening in Your Organization

You don’t need to prepare a polished presentation before speaking with us.

It helps more to hear an honest account of where things stand. Maybe training goes out regularly, but you’re not sure it’s helping. Maybe you have plenty of content and no time to organize it. Perhaps one person has been managing awareness alongside several other responsibilities, and keeping up has become difficult.

We want to understand that before recommending more activity.

The first conversations cover your workforce, existing tools, current program, and the areas where your team needs help. We also discuss what you want employees to do differently.

“Improve awareness” might be the overall goal. The more useful detail could be that employees aren’t reporting suspicious emails, or that finance needs a clearer way to verify payment requests.

Those details help us decide where to begin.

We Look at What You Already Have Before Adding More

Working with AwareNex doesn’t mean starting again.

If a training activity is useful, there’s no reason to replace it simply because a new partner has arrived. The same goes for a reporting process employees understand or a communication channel that reaches people reliably.

Our cybersecurity awareness assessment process helps identify what to keep, where the gaps are, and what deserves attention first.

For example, a campaign with low participation might need a better delivery schedule rather than new content. An employee reporting problem might come down to unclear instructions. A team that struggles with an exercise may need guidance specific to the requests it receives.

We also need to hear about the practical constraints. If a department has a busy period coming up, or employees rarely sit at a computer, that should influence the plan.

A program is much easier to maintain when it fits the way people work.

You Have Someone to Talk to Who Knows the Program

One concern with outsourcing is ending up between several people, explaining the same request over and over.

Your dedicated cybersecurity awareness advisor provides a main point of contact for the agreed work. They help coordinate the specialists contributing to your program, including strategy, research, writing, editing, design, and cybersecurity support.

So if a campaign needs changing, you know where to go. If leadership introduces a new priority, you can discuss how it affects the plan. Your team shouldn’t have to become the project manager for every individual contribution.

This is also where responsibilities need to be clear.

Your advisor coordinates the agreed activities. Your organization provides the necessary business context, access, and approvals. The service scope sets out the support and deliverables you can expect.

Getting that understood early makes the relationship easier for everyone.

Then We Work Out What Should Happen First

There’s usually no shortage of possible awareness topics. Choosing what matters now takes more thought.

The early planning work connects your priorities to activities, audiences, and dates. It also establishes who needs to review each activity and what you want to learn from it.

Suppose your finance team receives frequent requests to change supplier payment details.

A useful campaign could walk employees through how to verify a request, explain which contact details to use, and give them a realistic scenario to practice. A follow up reminder could reinforce the process without asking them to repeat an entire course.

For HR, the concern might be handling attachments from unfamiliar applicants. For another team, it could be sharing sensitive files or responding to unexpected login prompts.

The point is to make cybersecurity awareness training for employees feel connected to their actual responsibilities.

That takes more than choosing a topic. It involves preparing the content, checking the instructions, scheduling delivery, and making sure the right people see it. Those are the everyday tasks that managed support helps address.

We Work Through the Tools You Already Use

If you’ve already invested in an LMS or phishing platform, you probably don’t want to replace it just to get help running the program.

AwareNex’s managed service works through your existing technology and communication channels. The support focuses on the program around those tools, including the agreed setup, content, scheduling, monitoring, and reporting.

During the early stages, we establish the access needed and how approvals will work. Your organization retains final approval before activities are launched.

Platform licensing is separate from the service. If you don’t have suitable technology in place, that becomes part of the discussion rather than something we assume you already have.

What SANS Research Says About Staffing an Awareness Program

If awareness keeps getting pushed back because nobody has time, your team isn’t alone.

In its 2025 Security Awareness Report findings, SANS identified limited time and staffing as the two biggest challenges facing awareness programs. Its research put the average staffing needed to meaningfully influence employee behavior at a minimum of 2.8 dedicated full time equivalents.

That figure measures time committed to the program, rather than simply counting people with an awareness title. Someone spending half their working hours on awareness contributes 0.5 of a full time equivalent.

It isn’t a rule that every business must hire three people. It does, however, help explain why handing awareness to one busy employee as an extra responsibility can leave important work unfinished. Planning, writing, training, employee communications, and reviewing results all need time.

This is where managed cybersecurity awareness services can help. With AwareNex, your advisor coordinates the agreed program work with support from specialists. Your organization can access those capabilities without recruiting a separate internal role for each one.

The right amount of support depends on your workforce and goals. During the first few weeks, we work with you to establish what your team can realistically handle and where additional capacity would make the biggest difference.

Where the Cost Benefit Comes From

At some point, most organizations considering outsourced cybersecurity awareness support ask the same question: would it be better to hire someone?

Sometimes, yes. An internal hire can be a good fit, especially when there is enough ongoing work for the role and the organization has the resources to support it.

But it’s worth looking at everything that person would be expected to do.

Awareness work can involve cybersecurity knowledge, research, writing, design, employee communications, training, campaign administration, and analysis. A capable employee may cover several of those areas and still need help with others.

The cost comparison therefore goes beyond salary. It should also consider recruitment, employer costs, onboarding, specialist support, and the time someone spends managing the work.

AwareNex brings agreed capabilities together under one service fee. You don’t have to recruit a separate person for every skill the program needs.

That can make outsourced support more economical, particularly when the alternative is adding several contributors or asking an already busy team to absorb the workload.

The actual savings depend on your circumstances. There isn’t an honest percentage that applies to every organization. The useful comparison is between the full cost of delivering the work internally and the scope of support in your proposal, including any separate software or other expenses.

Already Have an Awareness Team? We Can Support Them Too

You don’t have to choose between an internal team and outside help.

An organization may have someone who knows its people, policies, and priorities extremely well, but who needs more capacity to deliver the program.

They might want help preparing campaign materials, coordinating communications, organizing the calendar, or reviewing results. Keeping those tasks moving can give the internal owner more time for decisions that need their knowledge of the business.

Your team still provides direction. AwareNex takes on the agreed program work around it.

Our cybersecurity awareness services include assessment, strategy, and managed support, so the relationship can reflect how much responsibility you want to retain internally.

What Changes Once Activities Start Going Out?

Launching training is one part of the work. Paying attention to what happens afterward is another.

Are employees participating? Are they reporting concerns? Is one instruction causing confusion? Does a particular group need a different example?

A completion figure can tell you who finished an activity. It won’t explain all of those things.

As the program progresses, the agreed reporting and reviews help inform what comes next. An activity may need adjustment, a topic may need revisiting, or a new business priority may change the schedule.

The material itself can vary too. A short newsletter, a discussion, or a practical reminder may suit a particular need better than another formal lesson. Our free cybersecurity awareness resources offer examples of the formats that can support those conversations.

Consistency comes from planning and following through, then making sensible changes when something isn’t working.

What Should You Expect From the First Few Weeks?

You shouldn’t expect a few weeks of onboarding to prove that employee behavior has changed across the business.

You should expect the work to become clearer as assessment and planning progress.

That means understanding the priorities, knowing who is responsible, agreeing how approvals happen, and establishing the next activities. Specific deliverables and dates should be set out in your engagement plan.

You’ll still have a role to play. We need your organization’s context and decisions to make the program relevant. But you’ll have someone to coordinate the agreed work, instead of approaching every campaign with the same question: who has time to put this together?

Let’s Start With the Work You Need Help With

You may already know exactly where your awareness program needs support. Or you may simply know that too much of it keeps getting postponed.

Either is a useful place to start.

Tell us what you have in place, what your team can manage, and what you would like taken off its plate. We can then discuss whether an assessment, a strategy, or ongoing managed support makes sense.

Schedule a cybersecurity awareness consultation with AwareNex to talk through what working together could look like.