The scarcity of skilled cyber security workers in Europe is getting worse, with just under two-thirds of employers saying they are now short of staff, according to the latest report from (ISC)2.
The training and certification body’s Cybersecurity workforce study 2019, which was based on interviews with 3,200 professionals around the world, revealed the gap in the number of skilled personnel in the region has almost doubled to 291,000 over the past year. It also indicated the challenge was most marked among small companies with less than 100 staff or large ones with more than 500.
But whatever the size of the business, survey respondents pointed to skills shortfalls as being their number one concern, with just over half saying they feared their organisation was at either moderate or extreme risk as a result.
That such concerns are widespread was also backed up by the UK cyber security skills survey, conducted by Ipsos Mori on behalf of the government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) at the end of 2018.
It found that 54% of the businesses it questioned – the equivalent of 710,000 out of a total of 1.32 million across the country – had insufficient access to basic expertise, which included detecting and removing malware. Just under a third (407,000 organisations) also experienced high-level technical skills gaps in areas such as penetration testing, interpreting malicious code and user monitoring.
Other specialist fields in which expertise was lacking among companies in the cyber security industry itself, meanwhile, included cloud and endpoint security, identity and access management, and threat-hunting, with artificial intelligence software and other automation technologies expected to join the list over the next three to five years.
But the end result of all this, points out Martin Courtney, principal analyst at research company TechMarke ..
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