As the frequency and complexity of attacks increase, and the demand for InfoSec professionals in business grows, the number of practitioners meeting the company’s requirements for skills and level of expertise is declining. Studies carried out by cybersecurity companies and international organisations have already highlighted the lack of InfoSec professionals. Research conducted by (ISC)2 cybersecurity workforce study revealedthat the workforce gap was almost of 4 million InfoSec workers in 2022.
Looking at cybersecurity needs across industries, the government sector reported the highest demand for cybersecurity practitioners, and admitted that nearly half (46%) of the Infosec roles it required remain unfilled. The telecom and media sectors are understaffed by 39% followed by retail & wholesale and healthcare with 37% of its roles remaining vacant.
“To reduce the shortage of qualified InfoSec professionals, companies offer high salaries, better working conditions and bonus packages, while also investing in up-to-date training with the latest knowledge. However, the research results show that these measures are not always enough. The growth rate of the domestic IT market in some developing regions is changing so rapidly, the labor market cannot manage to educate and train the appropriate specialists with the necessary skills and expertise in such tight deadlines. On the contrary, regions with developed economies and matured businesses do not report such an acute shortfall of InfoSec professionals as their rates are below market average,” comments Vladimir Dashchenko, Security evangelist, ICS CERT, Kaspersky.
To minimise negative consequences of global cybersecurity staff shortfall, Kaspersky experts recommend the following:
The full report with more findings on the state of InfoSec labor market is available via the link.
¹The research ‘The portrait of modern Information Security professional’ was conducted in order to evaluate the current state of the labor market and analyze the exact reasons for the cybersecurity skills shortage. 1,000 InfoSec professionals from Asia-Pacific, Europe, the META region, North and Latin America were researched.