According to a report from Enterprise Strategy Group titled The Life and Times of Cybersecurity Professionals, 70 percent of cyber security professionals believe that their organization is being negatively impacted by the skills shortage in the tech industry. To make matters worse, “63 percent say the cyber security skills shortage has increased the workload on existing staff, 41 percent have had to hire junior personnel in lieu of more experienced staff, and 41 percent claim the cyber security staff spends a disproportional amount of time on incident response and limited time on planning and strategy.” This is bad. If most companies are opting for inferior or non-existent cyber security measures, hackers will likely have free reign of corporate secrets, personal information, and pretty much whatever they want. Fortunately, there is a solution that, while expensive and lengthy, is the only real way to make a difference: continuous education. While decision makers’ lack of awareness about the dangers of cyber attacks remains an issue, the skills gap presents a much more difficult problem to solve. You can’t merely convince employees to be better at cyber security like you could a founder that refuses to spend on protecting their company. Continuing education is the only way to make sure this issues is resolved. And that is, unfortunately, going to take some time.
