Addressing The Elephant in the Room: Cybersecurity’s Increasing Talent Shortage

The cybersecurity space is in dire straits. Hackers are getting smarter and more sophisticated…and the availability of skilled men and women to combat them has never been lower. It’s an issue that’s been slowly growing worse year over year, yet there’s no clear solution in sight. What’s a business leader to do?

The good news is that there’s never been a better time to be a cybersecurity expert.

That bad news is that it’s because the market for cybersecurity professionals has never been tighter. As noted by Gartner senior research analyst Sam Olyaei, the unemployment rate for men and women with cybersecurity expertise is almost zero. There are more jobs than there are people to fill them; this skills gap is going to get worse before it gets better.

“If you’re a cybersecurity professional with any kind of skill set, you already have a job and multiple offers on the table,” Olyaei explained at last year’s Gartner Security & Risk Assessment Summit. “The talent shortage is here and it’s here to stay. It’s not going away, so we can either confront it or be left behind and lose our seat at the table.”

Therein lies the problem, though. How exactly does one confront it? After all, as a small business, you might not necessarily even have the necessary budget to hire a dedicated cybersecurity professional.

Here’s the thing, though – you need to do everything in your power to make the funds available. Large data breaches might make more headlines, but small businesses are targeted and successfully hacked far more often. Criminals know that a lot of smaller organizations don’t have big cybersecurity budgets.

That’s why 58% of malware victims are small businesses. It’s why 61% of small businesses experienced a cyber attack in 2017. And it’s why (Read more...)