Many UK business and technology executives aren’t hopeful about their digital security going into 2022. In a survey of 3,600 business and technology executives, of which 257 were from the UK, PwC learned that a majority (61%) of respondents expected to see an increase in reportable ransomware attacks next year. An even greater proportion (64%) of UK respondents said that they were planning to witness a rise in attacks targeting their cloud services over that same period, as reported by Consultancy.uk. Approximately the same proportion of survey participants revealed that they also anticipated growth in the number of software supply chain breaches.

The Cybersecurity Skills Gap as a Persistent Problem

It doesn’t help that organizations are struggling with the skills gap. As we know worldwide, IT security professionals are in high demand. There aren’t enough of them to go around to every single situation or every single organization. There’s also a very heavy turnaround within government where they can’t retain people. They’ve been poached by the commercial side.

In the UK specifically, the cybersecurity skills shortage increased by more than a third between November 2020 and 12 months later. This growth motivated 43% of UK digital leaders to admit that they had a shortage in cybersecurity, wrote Infosecurity Magazine. Approximately the same proportion (40%) of respondents revealed that they couldn’t retain their cybersecurity staff for as long as they wanted before another organization lured them away with the offer of new money.

What do those findings look like in practice? To answer that question, we turn to a 2021 report issued by The UK Government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media, & Sport. Overall, the report revealed that 340,000 UK businesses in the private sector suffered from a skills gap in penetration testing. This was followed by 313,000 businesses that (Read more...)