Overcome The Cybersecurity Skills Crisis With A People-first Approach And The Right Integrated Solutions

The perfect storm of accelerated digital transformation, a pandemic-induced remote workforce, and escalation of cybercrime has greatly exacerbated a global shortage of skilled IT professionals. With the sharp increase in cloud computing and use of remote mobile devices, cybersecurity vulnerabilities are expanding exponentially. The increase of cyber threats coupled with the labor gap is causing many to leave the field due to stress and burnout.

Less staff + increased threats = amplified risk

Cybersecurity professionals site a number of causative factors for the labor shortage and weakening recruitment into the field.

• Inability to grow in their current roles and underappreciatedInability to grow in their current roles and underappreciated
• Don’t want the inevitability of a cyber breach to tarnish their careers
• Stress from heavy workloads that are impossible to properly manage
• Dissatisfaction with salaries and limited support to develop skills

The consequences of an insufficiency in skilled IT professionals can lead to ruinous repercussions for an enterprise. Along with the inability to maintain an awareness of all active threats against the network, there can be oversights in procedures and processes, misconfigured systems, rushed deployments and a slow response to patching critical systems. Without enough skilled labor, there simply isn’t enough time for comprehensive risk assessment and management.

A remote workforce expands and intensifies security challenges

While the work from home (WFH) movement, which started largely out of necessity, has led to some obvious benefits, it has also greatly contributed to an expanding cyber threat landscape. A lack of security awareness among workers and the use of often weak passwords are escalating opportunities for bad actors. Email phishing schemes have become a major threat, while video conferencing and other collaborative tools sharing data over the cloud impose more security gaps. Help desk teams face enormous strain from trying to manage complications from so many distributed assets and remote workers.

You can’t just slap a technology bandaid on the problem

Due to high demand, it has become more difficult to recruit skilled people. According to the 2021 (ISC)2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study, the global number of skilled professionals needs to grow by 65% in order to adequately defend the critical assets of organizations. Cybersecurity leaders need to change the recruitment process if they are to solve the labor shortage. In a field that has been dominated by a male, white, and degreed demographic, the answer lies in embracing a DEI culture – diversity, equity, and inclusivity. While investing in continually evolving technology is important, it is crucial to invest in a people-first solution to answer the ongoing skills gap in the cybersecurity field.

Companies can improve the future outlook for the cybersecurity profession by employing these tactics:

• Foster recruitment from within through training and upward mobility
• Create mentor and apprenticeship programs aimed at women and minorities to promote a DEI culture
• Look for people from other disciplines that have transferable skills and attributes
• Offer support for the ongoing development of skills and certifications
• Equalize pay scales over demographics
• Create a corporate-wide cybersecurity culture and sense of responsibility that gives more meaning and engagement to the work

These measures, along with embracing flexible WFH policies, can increase the recruitment pool, as well as improve current employee retention.

The right security solutions can offer relief to overburdened IT

With increased cloud migration and remote operations, many security solutions cannot provide adequate functions and capabilities in cloud environments. Remote security access and permissions remains a serious challenge, and VPN’s are insufficient to fully secure the access of remote workers to IT systems.

A comprehensive approach to IT hygiene can potentiate skilled resources already in-house, while making threat management and assessment more manageable. Deploying an integrated cybersecurity platform will eliminate the blindspots created by single point siloed solutions. A centralized collaborative dashboard provides a single-pane-of-glass view for simplified management. Through leveraging intuitive automation, manual and repetitive workloads are reduced to maximize the efficiency of current teams and free up resources for more important initiatives. A centralized, integrated system enables teams to keep up with important patch upgrades and can offer enhanced security for remote ops through multifactor authentication and password managers.

RevBits Cyber Intelligence Platform (CIP) is the cybersecurity relief package

Companies waging war against cyber crime with insufficient staff and ineffective solutions need the right armament to gain an edge and some traction against growing threats. RevBits CIP enables intelligence sharing across multiple security solutions within one intuitive user dashboard. With single sign-on capability, managers gain a quick comprehensive view of all systems through a single pane for complete awareness with context. Immediate threat alerts are displayed for all security solutions, enabling admins to initiate prompt response and mitigation.

RevBits CIP integrated security solutions include:

• Extended Detection and Response
• Endpoint Security
• Email Security
• Privileged Access Management
• Zero Trust Networking
• Deception Technology

The cybersecurity challenges we face today are not likely to lessen in the future. Cyber crime will continue to evolve in sophistication and find ways to outsmart our technologies. We will continue to innovate in order to have the advantage on the playing field. Adopting new strategies to enhance recruitment opportunities and attraction to the field of cybersecurity can go a long way in alleviating labor shortages. By integrating the best security solutions today, companies can decrease overhead and maximize the team resources they currently have, while diminishing threat vulnerabilities.