Challenge of Retaining Cybersecurity Workforce

Introduction

Rapid technological advancement leads to new ways of how the business operates. New technologies like cloud, IoT, AI, and automation are creating new opportunities that were never seen before. As technology advances, so do these criminals, they are coming with novel ways to attack, but our industry is not able to adapt accordingly. The primary reason behind this is a shortage of skilled and up-to-date cybersecurity workforce

It’s no secret that there is a massive gap in demand and supply of cybersecurity personnel. It is estimated that there will be a talent shortage of 1.8 million staff. Due to this gap, value of all current cybersecurity professionals has increased exponentially and retaining them is became a big headache for CISO. To deal with this we have to create a new cybersecurity talent and make our cybersecurity operation more efficient.

Train all your staff about cybersecurity

It has been observed that most of the time, our cybersecurity specialists deal with very basic issues, which can be solved by anyone with the basic knowledge. We are wasting talents of such specialized workers and also hampering their growth, as these employees have very high pay due to huge demand, we are paying large sums of money for solving basic issues. Well, we can deal with this situation if we train all of our employees with basic cybersecurity courses at regular intervals to keep them updated; in this way, our security specialists will deal with real issues and not just wasting their time on solving basic mistakes of our regular employees.

Talent Migration

If we can’t get enough talent from the market, then we create our own talent from the existing pool of our current technical employees. Employees who have an interest and ready to learn new things must be identified and provided with training with the latest cybersecurity-related skillset. In this way, we can create our own talent without fighting with competition for such skilled professionals. We can couple this step with the above step as in basic training employees, who perform well must be selected for specialization and stream migration.

Enrolling Ethical Hackers

There are thousands of ethical hackers in the market, who don’t have any formal training or graduation degree, but they have a hands-on experience of cybersecurity as they have polished their skills by regularly participating in various hackathons and bug bounty hunting programs. The industry must move on from this criterion of hiring graduates, as it has been observed that the majority of computer science graduate programs provide very little to no cybersecurity-related training. Whereas these non-graduates have a far better skill set as compared to graduates, it’s time to move on from our traditional ways.

Automation

Automation can help us to cover this gap of demand and supply of the cybersecurity workforce as we can automate all the repetitive tasks. Analyzing large no of events that require many security analysts can be made easy with automating all routine tasks, so fewer analysts can do the job.