According to the findings from a recent Kaspersky study revealed at Cybersecurity Weekend, 41% of companies worldwide are facing a shortfall of qualified cybersecurity professionals. This problem is even more sensitive for the Middle East, Turkiye, and Africa (META) region, with 43% of companies understaffed. Most understaffing can be found among Malware analysts and Information security researchers.
As the frequency and complexity of cyberattacks increase, and the demand for InfoSec professionals in business grows, the number of practitioners meeting the company’s requirements for skills and level of expertise is declining.
META Lacks InfoSec professionals
Studies carried out by cybersecurity companies and international organizations have already highlighted the lack of InfoSec professionals. Research conducted by (ISC)2 cybersecurity workforce study revealed that the workforce gap was almost 4 million InfoSec workers in 2022.
Looking at cybersecurity needs across industries, the government sector reported the highest demand for cybersecurity practitioners and admitted that nearly half (46%) of the Infosec roles it required remain unfilled. The telecom and media sectors are understaffed by 39% followed by retail & wholesale and healthcare with 37% of its roles remaining vacant.
“To reduce the shortage of qualified InfoSec professionals, companies offer high salaries, better working conditions and bonus packages, while also investing in up-to-date training with the latest knowledge. However, the research results show that these measures are not always enough. The growth rate of the domestic IT market in some developing regions is changing so rapidly, that the labor market cannot manage to educate and train the appropriate specialists with the necessary skills and expertise in such tight deadlines. On the contrary, regions with developed economies and matured businesses do not report such an acute shortfall of InfoSec professionals as their rates are below market average,” comments Vladimir Dashchenko, Security evangelist, ICS CERT, Kaspersky.
To minimize the negative consequences of global cybersecurity staff shortfall, Kaspersky experts recommend the following:
- Adopt managed security services such as Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response (MDR) or/and Incident Response to get additional expertise without additional hiring. It helps to protect against cyberattacks and investigate incidents even if a company lacks security workers.
- Invest in additional cybersecurity courses for your staff to keep them up to date with the latest knowledge. With Kaspersky Expert training, InfoSec professionals can advance their hard skills and be able to defend their companies against attacks.
- Use interactive simulators to test your expertise and assess the way you think in critical situations. For instance, with the new Kaspersky interactive ransomware game, you can observe the way the company’s IT department deploys, investigates and responds to an attack and makes vital decisions with the game’s main character.
- Use centralized and automated solutions such as Kaspersky Extended Detection and Response (XDR) to reduce the burden on the IT security team and minimize the possibility of making mistakes. By aggregating and correlating data from multiple sources in one place and using technologies of machine learning, these solutions provide effective threat detection and fast automated response.
The research ‘The portrait of modern Information Security professional’ was conducted in order to evaluate the current state of the labor market and analyze the exact reasons for the cybersecurity skills shortage. 1,000 InfoSec professionals from Asia-Pacific, Europe, the META region, North and Latin America were researched.
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