Examining education’s role in cybersecurity’s future

One of the issues we have explored on this blog is the cybersecurity talent shortage that many organizations are facing. In fact, 44 percent of organizations are short on staff with strong cyber security and networking knowledge, according to a recent ESG report entitled, “Network Security Trends in the Era of Cloud and Mobile Computing.”

Recently, the information security skills deficit was explored in detail at the U.S. News and World Report STEM Solutions Conference in San Diego, where cybersecurity experts from both the public and private sector discussed how best to develop the next generation of information security professionals. Specifically, the panel talked about the need for American schools to adjust their STEM curriculum to better educate students for future challenges. While a number of ideas were bandied about, the overarching theme was that students must begin learning about concepts and technologies— like coding, data flow and the Internet of Things—earlier in their education.

As information security professionals ourselves, we strongly favor teaching our youth the skills necessary to become cyber security experts. The IT talent deficit is widening every day, and if we don’t take action, that trend will continue.

At the same time, even if we made changes to the education system tomorrow, those adjustments would not begin to bear fruit for a generation; it might be 15 or 20 years before we would start to see more qualified cyber security professionals on the job market. And while that would be a welcome development, the truth is that contemporary organizations need help right now.

Because of the dearth of top-notch cyber security talent and the competition for high-quality candidates, simply staffing up to deal with the increasing number of alerts organizations are facing is no longer sustainable. Automated incident response, however, can be invaluable as a tool helping SOCs work more efficiently. An incident response platform can analyze high-volume, low-complexity events and execute remediation automatically, leaving expert staffers to identify and thwart more sophisticated attacks.

Reach out to see a demonstration of how an automated incident response platform can help improve operations and boost efficiency in your SOC.