I understand, Rome wasn’t built in a day and there are many impressive initiatives that have been designed to address the burning issue of skills shortage, but why is it still anticipated that there will be 3.5 million cybersecurity job openings by 2021?

Of course, the reasons behind this are multifaceted and complex, aside from the obvious increase in fast evolving cyber-attacks, we have distilled it down to two main factors; quality of education and training and workload.

Cyber skills gap

Currently it is common practice that the responsibility of cybersecurity is left solely on the shoulders of your specialist. Gone are the days of your isolated IT function, every IT position should also be a cybersecurity position. If you work in IT or technology, you need to be involved in the protection and defence of data, infrastructure, apps and people.

Much is being done in the market to cross-train existing professionals and finally governments and enterprise organisations are taking responsibility. For example, in the UK, the National Cyber Security Centre will be offering CyberFirst courses to more than 1,000 14-to-17-year-olds on purpose designed courses aimed at reducing the UK’s cyber skills gap.

Slowing teams down

With the plethora of technologies that your new cyber security professional needs to handle, it is no surprise that these individuals struggle in managing their security workloads.

The issue of managing these non-integrated products is slowing teams down. With an increase in specialist products coming to market, this clutter can be counterproductive and chaotic in an already complex industry.

Moving forward we need to ensure simplicity without impacting the security status. To free up time and energy, something that could be done would be to consolidate the solution to deliver consistent and unified management.

FMC @ Infosec 2018

If you would like to have a further conversation about what can be done to source new (and upskill existing talent) then please reach out to me on william.adamthwaite@fmctalent.com or call me on +44 (0) 1275 840 681 to arrange a time for us to meet up at Infosec 2018 and discuss further.