As organisations are accelerating their digital transformation journey and growth, managing
cybersecurity function with potential resources have become crucial to safeguard against
risks.
The most important cybersecurity threat to most organisations nowadays is with on boarding
potentials resources with right level of skillsets.
In India, 60 per cent of the organisations have unfilled cybersecurity positions and 42 per cent
report their organisation’s cybersecurity team is understaffed, reveals the eighth annual
cybersecurity survey from global IT association ISACA.
59 per cent believe that less than half of their applicants are well qualified for the position
they are applying, according to a People Matters report.
“A sudden phase of working in an open environment during the pandemic had raised
cybercrimes. Paired with longstanding resource challenges like cybersecurity skills gaps,
leaving companies and challenges in hiring in not getting resources with the expertise they
need,” said Kavitha Srinivasulu, Global Head of Cyber Risk & Data Privacy- BFSI R&C,
TCS from her experience point of view.
She further explained that some companies lack dedicated security staff entirely, while others
have a small, overworked department trying to manage enormous workloads with minimal
skillsets which is vulnerable in nature.
Organisations are struggling in hiring and retaining cybersecurity professionals with potential
skill sets. The global cybersecurity workforce needs to grow effectively in numbers and skill
sets to protect the organisations’ critical assets & data.
Unfilled Cybersecurity Positions
Sixty-two percent of India-based respondents say it takes three to six months for their
organisations to find qualified cybersecurity candidates for open positions, compared to 47
per cent globally.
The report further added that for respondents in India, the top factors hiring managers use to
determine whether a candidate is qualified are prior hands-on cybersecurity experience (77
per cent), credentials (45 per cent) and hands-on training (38 per cent).
Two in three (65 per cent) respondents report difficulties retaining qualified cybersecurity
professionals, a 14 percentage -point increase from 2021.
Kavitha Srinivasulu further pointed out that some of the means by which skill shortages can
be reduced is by building regular employee awareness sessions, developing internal talent,
getting the resources certified with current technologies, cross functional training, ensuring
the resources are trained on facing cyber threats and incidents by doing simulations &
tabletop exercises including others. These are some of the best practices that can lessen the
talent shortage challenges that’s prevailing.
Microsoft has expanded its cybersecurity skills campaign to an additional 23 countries.
Cybersecurity continues to be a significant threat for organisations and individuals around the
world and cybercriminals have become increasingly sophisticated and the threat landscape
more diverse.
These cybersecurity challenges are compounded by a workforce shortage, there aren’t enough
people with the cybersecurity skills needed to fill open jobs, according to industry watchers.
More than a dozen cybersecurity companies are working on a single, open standard for
sharing data about hacking threats, a project that will help organisations detect cyberattacks
more quickly.
The initiative, where Amazon (AMZN), Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, IBM (IBM), Okta, and
Salesforce (CRM) are involved, aims to address a critical bottleneck in threat information
sharing: the various data formats currently used across multiple cybersecurity tools and products.
