Addressing the talent shortage with a unified security approach
The need for skilled cybersecurity personnel is having an impact on companies’ ability to stay secure. Despite the global cybersecurity workforce growing to 4.7 million in 2022, reaching record levels, according to data from the (ISC)2 2022 workforce study, there’s still a need for more than 3.4 million security professionals, an increase of 26% over 2021.
Businesses are realizing they need to find new solutions to deal with this skills gap, and they are turning to technology to achieve efficient protection and optimize security resources.
How to shrink the cybersecurity talent gap
The cybersecurity talent shortage has increased the pressure and demands on the existing workforce. On the one hand, security administrators must protect their organizations from increasingly advanced threats with limited time and resources. On the other, they have to keep up with new technologies and regulations. If your organization is struggling with security workloads and the added challenges of the skills shortage, here are a few measures that can help:
- Training:
Nearly 95% of CIOs report that certification programs have helped their organizations shrink the skills gap. Providing training and certification opportunities for security personnel benefits both organizations and individuals. For instance, cybersecurity vendor certification programs allow team members to complement their academic qualifications and update their knowledge with relevant cybersecurity skills so that they can deploy and operate the new products and technologies that can protect your organization.
- Automation:
In addition to training, companies need to leverage technology to lighten the load on their employees. AI and automation-driven solutions are great options in this respect. More than half (57%) of organizations are already automating aspects of their security, while another quarter (26%) intend to do so in the near future. Data from a recent report reveals that the lack of prioritization and automation has lost organizations thousands of hours in terms of time and productivity by generating massive backlogs, which they simply do not have the time or resources to manage. Automation is key to optimizing the efficiency of cybersecurity teams. The greater the number of repetitive tasks you can automate, the more time your analysts will have to focus their efforts on key complex tasks.
- Integrated security:
Disconnected security is clearly no longer an option in the sophisticated threat landscape of 2023. Businesses need to adopt a unified and simplified approach to security. Failure to integrate cybersecurity tools into a heterogeneous security approach leads to operational inefficiencies and wastes time and resources. This increases your team’s workload and produces security cracks and visibility gaps that weaken your company’s overall security posture.
An integrated strategy comes to grips with this issue by concentrating on equipping the limited number of professionals available to organizations with the best possible toolsets to optimize their knowledge and work.
A Gartner survey revealed that 65% of organizations expect to improve their overall risk posture and reduce complexity through vendor consolidation. The best way to address many of the challenges the cybersecurity talent shortages causes is to adopt a more simplified, comprehensive approach. Implementing a unified approach with a single security platform enables businesses to strengthen their defenses against advanced threats by automating tasks and streamlining processes. Apart from enabling professionals to work efficiently and effectively and achieve robust security, this strategy also aims to improve the employee experience, which enhances talent retention and mitigates problems associated with staffing shortages.
Learn all about WatchGuard’s Unified Security Platform® architecture here. To find out more about how adopting a unified security approach helps protect businesses, check out the following posts on our blog:
