It has recently been widely reported that there is a growing talent shortfall of security professionals, which is expected to reach 1.5 million by 2020. This will prove to be an unlikely cause of serious application security weaknesses and data theft in the coming years.
With the never-ending newscycle of reports on data breaches, it is vital for companies to assess how they can avoid these breaches. Having the right talent in place is key for combating the cyber-threats that seem to be growing more frequent and severe.
Recently, Cisco released its 2017 Cybersecurity report which reported that it was yet another record year for successful cyber-attacks. An interesting stat from the report mentioned that “the cloud security provider CloudLock, now part of Cisco, has been tracking the growth of connected third-party cloud applications across a sample group of 900 organizations representing a range of industries. In that, there were about 129,000 unique applications observed at the beginning of 2016. By the end of October, that number had grown to 222,000. The number of applications has increased approximately 11 times since 2014.”
The report also noted that “90% of those organizations are striving to improve their threat defense technologies, through a handful of different strategies: separating IT and security functions, increasing security awareness training for employees, and implementing risk mitigation techniques.”
While that’s a step in the right direction, in terms of making sure employees are educated in how to mitigate risks, the threat is still there. Organizations are going to need the talent to continue to battle the never-ending cyber-attacks that are only likely to grow. Especially when it comes to application security.
