Wanted: Hands-On Cybersecurity Experience

Wanted: Hands-On Cybersecurity Experience
Organizations lament a lack of qualified job candidates as they continue to struggle to hire and retain security teams, the new ISACA State of Cybersecurity 2020 report shows.

RSA CONFERENCE 2020 - San Francisco - Nearly 80% of organizations say will need even more technical security staff - security engineers, security architects, analysts, incident responders, forensic analysts, for instance - in the next 12 months, according to new data from ISACA.


The data comes from a survey of mostly ISACA members as well as other organizations, more than half of whom say their security teams today are understaffed. Most are not satisfied with the qualifications of the job applicants they get: some 73% cite hands-on security experience as a key job qualification, followed by security credentials (35%), and hands-on training (25%). The study is based on data gathered from more than 2,000 respondents from more than 100 countries.


Greg Touhill, ISACA board director and president of Cyxtera Federal Group, says the evolution of security's defense-in-depth technology has helped lead to this conundrum: "We invested in a strategy of defense-in-depth, so we added another layer upon another layer, and all of these layers cost tremendous amounts of manpower - and [require] a lot of highly skilled" talent for each tool and platform that get added to those layers, he explains.


Interestingly, non-security skills are also high on employers' list: one-third of the respondents cite one of the main gaps they see in job candidates are soft skills - aka non-technical proficiencies such as communication, social, and leadership qualities - followed by IT knowledge and experience (30%).


ISACA Director Pam Nigro, who is also the senior director of information security in the GRC practice at Heath Care Service Corporation (HCSC), says ..

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