Page 145 - Cyber Defense eMagazine December 2022 Edition

The need for upskilling and training

The digital skills gap is an ongoing problem and one that is being felt heavily throughout the technology
industry. This problem extends to cybersecurity, however, the effects of this could be reduced if IT teams
were to be upskilled with cyber training.

The 2022 Cybersecurity skills gap report from Fortinet found that 64 per cent of organizations worldwide
have experienced some form of security breach, linking 80 per cent of those attacks to the cybersecurity
skill gap. Furthermore, non-malicious user error has been cited as the top cause of security incidents.
This highlights the gap in awareness and understanding around cyber-attacks by current employees and
the need to improve education around threats, both for cybersecurity and non-cybersecurity staff.

Through regular training and upskilling, organizations will be able to equip their staff with the knowledge
that will enable them to act effectively to protect against attacks, as well as understand what to do to
recover once a successful attack does occur.

Additionally, there are many untapped pools of individuals that can be drawn on to plug the gap. For
example, women are largely unrepresented in the technology world, with just 19 per cent of the tech
industry being made up of females. Thinking outside the box when looking for talent is one-way
organizations can extend the talent pools available to them, with no extra costs.

While training staff, finding talent, and eliminating human error is not an easy task, it is it a relatively small
expense in comparison to the financial, time, and reputation costs of stolen data.

Why automated technology is the way forward

Training and upskilling current employees is one way to minimize cyber risk, but eradicating human error
indefinitely is almost impossible without the right technology. Automation technology can strengthen and
compliment the efforts of employees, and with only 45 per cent of companies currently using automated
cybersecurity solutions to prevent and recover from attacks, the value is not being fully realized.

Resilient Zero Trust is one effective solution, monitoring an organization’s endpoint devices and
applications for suspicious activity. If a device logs on from an unfamiliar location, or accesses a restricted
application, an alert can be sent to a centralized IT team who have the power to freeze or shut off a
device to prevent a potential breach. The goal with this technology is for employees to remain operational,
rather than simply cutting them off at the first opportunity, whilst also helping to automate threat detection.

The number of Zero-Trust architectures deployed by businesses rose by 8 per cent between 2021 and
2022 as this technology offers a cost-effective way of bolstering cyber defenses.

Self-healing technologies can also strengthen an organization’s security portfolio, repairing and
recovering compromised devices automatically, reducing the risk of reinfection and allowing businesses
to continue using their existing enterprise devices.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – December 2022 Edition 145
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