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Let technology mind the gap

Editorial Type: Opinion     Date: 05-2015    Views: 2103      







Chris Sullivan, VP of Advanced Solutions at Courion, explains how organisations can help themselves in the face of an apparent cyber security skills shortage

The shortage of individuals with IT security skills is a hot topic in the UK. Recently, Cornucopia IT Resourcing claimed that the UK desperately required 200,000 IT security specialists to address the billions of cyber threats facing UK organisations each year. The UK isn't the only country feeling the skills gap. In Germany the demand for jobs in the tech industry is also intensifying, with many more companies attempting to employ digitally skilled workers.

This skills shortage prevents European economies from capitalising on the opportunities that the digital economy offers, as well as creating security challenges that organisations need to address if they are to benefit from the digital age. Not surprisingly, a recent Ernst & Young report revealed that more than one-third of UK organisations are completely unprepared for a cyber-attack, creating a potential danger of mounting financial loss and data theft.

To put the scale of this problem into perspective, take that one pound coin in your pocket. Figuratively speaking, you would need a stack of them 2,000 miles high to cover annual losses caused by data breaches. Now that's hard to imagine but I wouldn't recommend trying it, as the international space station might crash into the pile before you attained one-tenth of that height.

Nevertheless, training and recruiting skilled security worker requires a lot of time and resources, including policies to encourage young talent to get into the IT security field, new training centres, educational programmes and years of raising awareness among young people about the problem. Steps have been taken in this direction through numerous Government initiatives such as educational reforms to include coding into the national curriculum, industry partnerships for co-operation and technology innovation in the IT security field.

However this new generation of digitally skilled employees who have grown up with digital technology are years away from entering the workforce. Moreover, hackers are quick to find vulnerabilities in most new layers of defence that organisations are establishing to protect their assets. Therefore, a more immediate solution is required. But can organisations use other means to mitigate security risk despite the cyber security skills shortage? The answer is yes, organisations can use technology solutions to help compensate in part for the lack of cyber security manpower to ensure that businesses and their data are protected.

To mitigate the cyber skills shortage, organisations should adopt a holistic approach to IT security that combines training and education with compliance enforcement and robust security technology. This technology should be able to effectively minimise the need of human intervention in fighting cyber-crime. This is where Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions can help businesses to employ effective mechanisms to implement internal policies and procedures, whilst ensuring compliance with industry regulations. IAM solutions that include identity and access intelligence allow real-time monitoring to provide a clear view into suspicious activities that could pose a potential threat. This can significantly mitigate the risk of security breaches and aid organisations in their fight with emerging hacking threats, both internal and external, in the face of the cyber security skills shortage.

Of course, if you can you should and you must train people to help cope, but it is also important to leverage intelligent tools to automate security and assurance tasks to improve speed, accuracy and efficiency. Remember it's a big and complex problem. A fundamental step in this direction is to continuously mine for and eradicate excessive access. Excessive access comes in many forms, like privileged, orphaned and abandoned accounts that are consistently leveraged by our adversaries. Managing these down will reduce your complexity and your threat surface and ease the security administrative overhead. NC

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