The CISO’s Guide to Evaluating Cyber Training Solutions

According to Forrester Principal Analyst Jess Burn—and well-observed by every modern CISO—the old rules of security training are obsolete. Static, point-in-time certifications and click-through modules no longer build the muscle memory your team needs to function effectively when the wires are hot. The risk you face isn’t just a successful attack—it’s the reality of an unprepared defense.

The shift is underway. Security and risk leaders are moving away from measuring exposure to skills (certifications) to validating execution (performance). In fact, Forrester’s Security Survey, 2025 found that 87% of security decision-makers prioritize demonstrable skills when hiring.

This is why the very definition of “cyber training” has been rewritten, evolving into the Cybersecurity Skills and Training (CS&T) Platform market. Based on the latest Forrester Cybersecurity Skills and Training Landscape Report, here is a breakdown of how the modern cyber range is fundamentally changing talent development, tool efficacy, and organizational resilience—and what a CISO must demand from their vendor.

The Core Mandate: Skills-Based Readiness Over Certifications

A modern CS&T platform enables a critical shift to a skills-based talent management practice. It’s about building a bench of talent from within and ensuring existing teams can perform when pressure mounts.

Forrester identifies three key ways these platforms deliver business value:

1. Home-Grow Security Talent: Platforms offer unbiased skills challenges for hiring, broadening candidate pipelines beyond degrees and certifications. They provide custom development paths to build a bench for critical roles, accelerating skill acquisition.
2. Continuously Upskill and Cross-Train: As security roles blur with cloud and AI capabilities, CS&T platforms enable cross-functional upskilling for AppDev, ITOps, GRC, and business unit pros. This prepares the entire organization to respond effectively to real attacks.
3. Demonstrate Organizational Resilience: Reporting from these platforms links security to the cost of doing business, assisting in budget battles and demonstrating incident readiness to boards, cyber insurers, and regulators.

Beyond Training: The ‘Test’ and ‘Validate’ Imperatives

If you’re only using a platform for individual labs, you’re missing the true value of an elite cyber range. The market’s main trend confirms this: it’s moving from commoditized individual training content to realistic team and executive experiences.

At SimSpace, we see this in our own three-pillar approach: Train, Test, and Validate. This is where demonstrable skills meet operational readiness, particularly in the face of an AI-fueled adversary.

The Test Imperative: Optimizing Your Security Stack

Your SIEM, EDR, and SOAR tools are only as good as their tuning. Generic content can’t tell you if your specific, high-cost security stack will fail under pressure. This is why the ability to Test must be a core capability, moving beyond the simple “Emerging Threat Response” use case defined in the Forrester report.

A robust cyber range lets you:

• Integrate Your Full Tech Stack: You must be able to integrate your customer’s own security stack (and business applications) into the range for safe, live-fire testing.
• Perform Continuous Tool Validation: Use the range to validate and tune your entire stack, including AI tools, by running bakeoffs, side-by-sides, and optimization tests. This allows you to measure detection, latency, and false positives in context, which can lead to a demonstrable reduction in false positives and rationalized tech spend.

The Validate Imperative: Proving Resilience to Leadership

For CISOs, the primary challenge cited in the Forrester report is delivering the data and metrics necessary to effectively demonstrate platform ROI. This is where Validation separates a training tool from an operational readiness platform.

Validation means subjecting your processes to the same stress as your people and technology, enabling you to:

• Measure Business Outcomes: Move beyond simple completion stats to deliver performance data that links skills to business outcomes like faster incident response, reduced errors, and improved collaboration under pressure.
• Prove Compliance and Audit Readiness: Stress-test playbooks and cross-functional crisis response. Generate audit-ready reporting for regulators, execs, and GRC teams by mapping team skills and capabilities against industry frameworks like MITRE and NIST.

A CISO’s Checklist for Vetting Cyber Training Vendors

As the market accelerates, your partnership with a CS&T vendor is a strategic decision that affects not only your team’s skills but your overall cyber program budget and success.

When evaluating platforms, you should require vendors to:

1. Provide Actionable Metrics, Not Just Scores

Look for intuitive dashboards and easy integrations into GRC and Human Risk Management (HRM) solutions. The data must enable security leaders to deliver metrics to the board that demonstrate resilience and tie security to the cost of doing business. This means quantifiable proof of measurable improvements, positioning training as a core revenue enabler.

2. Anticipate Emerging Skills and Adversarial Tactics

The top market disruptor is keeping pace with emerging AI security skills and threats. Ask vendors to demonstrate how quickly they can deliver labs and breach simulations for newly uncovered vulnerabilities and novel adversary tactics. They must offer training on the use of generative and agentic AI by both attackers and defenders.

3. Be Built for the Future: Consolidation and Validation

The market is consolidating, with buyers abandoning fragmented point solutions in favor of integrated platforms that combine training, performance measurement, and readiness validation in a single offering. The future of hiring will be platforms using AI-powered engines and benchmarking databases to validate how professionals problem-solve and adapt under stress compared to peers, reducing reliance on certifications.

The Bottom Line: Confidence Comes From Execution

We’re in an era where untested tools and unvalidated processes are as dangerous as unskilled talent. Elite security teams cannot afford static training in a dynamic war. The new standard is continuous mission rehearsal and adaptive competence.

A true cyber range is the intelligent, realistic replica of your environment that allows you to preempt threats by strengthening your people, processes, and technology—before the fight begins.

Confidence in cybersecurity doesn’t come from a course completion badge; it comes from knowing your team, your tools, and your playbooks have all been stress-tested in a live-fire simulation and are ready for the attack that matters most.

To see what your custom, realistic cyber range looks like, schedule a demo with SimSpace.