Cybersecurity is integral to government and private organizations, ensuring that confidential data and resources are secured from malicious attacks. But to ensure strong cybersecurity, there is a need for a skilled workforce to take on the rising challenges.
As the sophistication of cyber threats increases, there is a need for more skilled professionals in cybersecurity teams. Many organizations need help in hiring qualified staff in this arena. According to an industry report, there will be around 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs by 2025 that will go vacant.
Lack of skills in most candidates and budget constraints on hiring talented individuals are integral reasons for this root shortage problem.
Let's dive deeper into this problem and try to find an understanding of it.
What Happens When Companies Won't Find Qualified Cybersecurity Professionals?
When companies fail to find qualified professionals to join their cybersecurity teams, the discrepancies in organizational security practices will increase. Some of the major problems that organizations might experience include the following:
· Misconfigured systems that are more vulnerable
· Increased lag time for operating the critical systems
· Lack of proper risk assessment or management
· Risky deployments
· Non-compliance with obligatory regulations
These problems worsen over time and create chaotic operational hiccups, compromising organizational data security and resources. Data breaches will be common, and there will be no strong defense against cyber-attacks.
Challenges Faced by Organizations while Hiring Cybersecurity Workforce Amidst Shortage
To ensure that you take suitable measures to overcome the cybersecurity shortage, you must first understand the challenges that organizations face. Due to this shortage, organizations needing to strengthen their cybersecurity are encountering several difficulties. They are:
1. Competing with Other Firms
As there are many companies across the globe looking out for skilled cybersecurity experts, the talent tool is limited. Therefore, companies must work on their job offers to ensure that qualified candidates pick them over others.
Small and medium-sized companies often lose in this competition as they have a restraint on the budget for hiring a cybersecurity expert. Meanwhile, large companies offer better salaries and perks, which convince the talents to be part of their firm.
Hence, the shortage crisis continues among a majority of companies!
2. Compromising on the Fixed Hiring Budget
As stated earlier, all sized companies must raise their hiring budget to hire a skilled cybersecurity person or team. Some other operational expenses must be managed when this compromise is made on increasing the hiring budget. It needs careful thinking as that might affect the overall revenue that your business generates.
Large companies with high turnovers might not have this issue or financial hiccup in sparing more money on hiring a skilled candidate. Still, small or medium-sized companies need to implement thorough thinking.
3. HR Department Lacks Understanding of Why Cybersecurity Hiring is Important
As per ISACA's report of 2020 on the State of Cybersecurity, more than 72% of the companies expressed that their HR department needs to be aware of the need for a cybersecurity team or person. In this way, the suitable candidates are skipped unknowingly, making the hiring process even more complex for the organization.
The only way to avoid this challenge is by briefly communicating the job requirements to the HR team. This way, they will understand how they can filter cybersecurity skills in candidates and convince them to join your company.
4. Niche-Wise, Skilled Professionals are Even Harder to Source
Hiring cybersecurity professionals was a challenge until skill gaps came to the scene. Some organizations need niche skills in cybersecurity to block loopholes and protect organizational resources. But, today, there is an acute skills shortage in applications security, investigation, security analysis, and cloud security sectors.
Hiring candidates with interpersonal skills, communication, creativity, and emotional intelligence are also challenging for companies.
Use of Automated Solutions to Resolve Cybersecurity Shortages
As per ISACA's State of Cybersecurity report of 2021, 16% of all respondent companies said it takes a minimum of six months to fill a cybersecurity vacancy. In the same report, around 50% of all hiring managers also agreed that most candidates applying for the position must be more qualified and skilled to take on the complex job.
Therefore, this shortage needs to be solved, but gradually over time. One such integral way to solve this shortage issue is by implementing automation for the cybersecurity aspects.
Use of Automated Cyber Security Solutions
As technology is growing stupendously, there is a feasibility of introducing security automation in organizational space to deal with this shortage of cybersecurity talents. Using such technology can help detect, assess, and eradicate cyber threats without human intervention.
Moreover, such automation can detect any potential incoming cyber threats or malware attacks to raise the alarm and prioritize the programmed response automatically. These automated security programs are designed to speed up the execution of protection remedies even before the attacks get time to spread across the system.
Such advancements use AI and Machine Learning to sense threats and neutralize them with adequate responses. The programs enable the system to raise counterattack measures alongside triggering an alarm.
Due to the shortage of cybersecurity talents, most security events are overlooked and ignored because the response to them needs to be specified. You never know what threat might intensify and cause a complete compromise of organizational data and operating efficiency. Therefore, introducing AI and ML-based automated security solutions will ensure that no potential threat calls go unattended.
Even if you have a strong team of cybersecurity professionals, it is still advised to integrate automated solutions to enhance the effectiveness quotient in repelling destructive cyber-attacks.
Conclusion
You should figure out what works to help you eradicate this shortage for your organization. You can only sometimes compete by offering to hire salary packages to the candidates, as the larger companies will always be able to provide better than you. Therefore, take a step back and train freshers, interns, or your current team with the help of advanced courses, practical sessions, or by hiring expert trainers.
You can make it a prerequisite for the interns or existing employees to obtain new cybersecurity certifications, to stay updated with modern-day needs. Taking the help of established automated security service providers might help overcome the shortages in the cybersecurity industry. The use of advanced machine learning is sure to change the landscape of the cybersecurity world. Every organization needing a cybersecurity workforce must adapt to a few changes in their hiring procedures to overcome this shortage.
For more information on how to adopt AI in Cyber security processes, contact us and one of our experts will be happy to contact you.
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