Anders Gronstedt, President of The Gronstedt Group, is an established author, public speaker and entrepreneur whose
global firm specializes in improving frontline performance through the use of “Serious
Games” and Sims.
The Gronstedt Group developed Cloud Defense, an innovative “Serious Game” designed to help Intuit Inc. employees
learn, practice, and master cyber security. The game has just won a Silver @
the 2017 International Serious Play Awards, in the Corporate category (please
find also Nine Games Earn Gold in the 2017 International Serious Play Awards).
Intuit Inc. is a business and financial
software company that develops and sells financial, accounting and tax
preparation software and related services for small businesses, accountants and
individuals. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California. Greater
than 95% of its revenues and earnings come from its activities within the
United States. Intuit produces TurboTax, a consumer tax preparation
application, the small business accounting program QuickBooks, professional tax
solutions ProSeries and Lacerte, and multiple payroll products. In addition to
the United States, the company has offices in eight countries around the world:
UK, Australia, France, Singapore, India, Brazil, Canada and Israel.
How do you get 3,000+ employees to practice and
master a new set of security concepts? That was the challenge facing software
maker Intuit, which had to change its corporate culture to make cyber security
everyone’s responsibility.
In Cloud
Defense, modeled after tower defense games, players learn and
practice Amazon Web Services (AWS) security protocols by defending their app in
an epic battle against a hacker attack. For each level, a new challenge and
“tower” is introduced and the degree of difficulty increases. The goals are to
allow good traffic to freely flow through the web infrastructure while
protecting the database from malicious hacker attacks.
Between the levels, a video “cut scene”
features a CNN-style news report about the crime syndicate threatening a
fictitious financial company and a mentor appears to provide instructions and
set up the next level of the game. Players learn about such security concepts as
Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR), Access Control Lists (ACL), Security
groups, Bastion Host, and Identity and Access Management service (IAM).
The “Serious Game” utilizes a leaderboard to
provide scoring information across the player population. The approach thrives
on the sense of engagement, storytelling, character identification, immersion,
problem solving, control, and feeling of accomplishment offered by games.
About Anders Gronstedt
Founded in 1997 and based in Denver, Colorado,
the Gronstedt Group is a digital training agency at the intersection of gaming,
media and learning. Anders Gronstedt, its President, is an advocate of using
Next-Gen Learning tools to advance real-world skills through virtual reality
training, transmedia storytelling and game-based learning.
The Gronstedt Group has been instrumental in
helping global companies like Google, Intuit, GE, United Healthcare, Dell,
Avaya, Microsoft, KPMG, DaVita, Kimberly-Clark and government clients like the
U.S. Department of Transportation and the City of New York improve performance
with innovative learning approaches.
Anders holds a PhD and is a former faculty
member of the University of Colorado–Boulder School of Journalism. His articles
have appeared in the Harvard Business Review.