2020 has been a very interesting year for the global workforce, with the vast majority of organizations having to rapidly transition to a remote workforce with little to no prior notice thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2020 (ISC)2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study looks at the effect of this transition to remote work and how organizations have fared. It also analyzes the impact of the pandemic and the resultant transition to remote work on cybersecurity professionals.

Here are eight key insights from the study:

1. The transition to a remote workforce (and securing this workforce) for most organizations was sudden but well managed

One of the key highlights from the 2020 (ISC)2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study is the sudden shift through which most organizations transitioned to a remote workforce as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of organizations managed this transition successfully.

Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, many organizations were forced to operate fully remotely (or mostly remotely) within days — with a considerable number of organizations forced to work remotely within a day.

Three in 10 organizations had to move to a remote workforce in a day or less, while nearly half (47%) had to move to this model within a week.

Notification given to move workforce remote

Things weren’t much different for the cybersecurity professionals tasked with securing the IT infrastructure of these organizations:

Length of time to secure remote

Close to a quarter (22%) of cybersecurity professionals were given a day or less to secure the remote workforce of the organization they work with, while 47 percent were given less than a week.

2. Most organizations were already well prepared to transition to remote work

While the COVID-19 pandemic was unprecedented and tested the wills of organizations to adapt their workforce to the new reality, the majority of organizations were not caught unprepared.

Quite surprisingly, 92% of (Read more...)