Handling the Cybersecurity Skills Shortage
Dana Raveh, March 23rd, 2022

Industry reports and surveys continue to show that the cybersecurity skills shortage shows no sign of slowing down. In light of this skills shortage, every business needs to understand how to get the most from all current cybersecurity personnel . This article provides actionable insight about handling the cybersecurity skills shortage through automation.

Overstretched Security Teams

It’s worth taking a look at some statistics to reinforce just how wide the cybersecurity skills gap is:

• (ISC)2’s Cybersecurity Workforce Study in 2021 found a global shortage of 2.72 million million unfilled positions requiring cybersecurity skills.
• Research centered on the UK labor market found that approximately 50 percent of businesses have gaps in basic cybersecurity skills.
• A modeling report by Emsi found that the United States has less than half of the cybersecurity candidates it needs to keep up with demand.

Most organizations have some level of access to cybersecurity expertise, but the problem is that this expertise isn’t effectively used. Overstretched security teams spend far too much time on manual, time-intensive tasks. These tasks include but are not limited to:

• Centralizing security findings from disparate systems and tools in order to group different threat signals
• Comparing security findings to ensure consistency and deduplicating data to remove redundancies
• Mapping security findings and remediation actions onto the relevant owners and assets
• Creating and assigning security tickets to the right people at the right time
• Tracking information across a diverse range of security tools and systems

The common thread running through this picture of how security teams work is an overreliance on manual tasks. In a workplace lacking cohesive and integrated workflows, security teams aren’t able to measure KPIs, such as the average time to remediation. Businesses need to ease the burden on security personnel if they want to keep their information, systems, and applications secure.

How Automation Can Help

The answer to handling the cybersecurity skills shortage is greater automation. You need to make it easier for security teams to do their jobs and protect your business in the current threat landscape. Automation reduces workload burdens and improves efficiency, both of which are vital for improving morale and strengthening your information security posture. A critical way automation can add value is through automated security workflows. While automated workflows aren’t new and have benefited many business processes, the security domain has yet to adopt them. Why? Because security workflows require serious security knowledge at the core of it.

Generic workflow tools won’t suffice. A risk-based approach is required, contextualization is essential and the expertise of turning findings to actions is critical. These workflows should also of course be codeless to facilitate agility and efficiency. An automation tool that uses code requires too much manual setup and maintenance time. Seamlessly creating security workflows can dramatically reduce the manual burden placed on modern security teams. With automated security workflows you can:

• Standardize and speed up pre-attack workflows to better combat cybersecurity threats
• Seamlessly turn security findings into actions for better transparency and reduced friction
• Get a holistic, organized, and integrated view of risk reduction tasks and processes
• Track progress by measuring important security metrics and KPIs
• Easily integrate actions in workflows with third-party tools using plugins

A win-win situation

Once you have a set of actionable workflows in place, the landscape in which security teams operate changes for the better. Resource optimization reduces time spent on manual, repetitive work. Security teams increase the scope of things they can fix because they no longer spend time triaging alerts and prioritizing what to fix. Ultimately, automated security workflows create a positive cycle that benefits all parties: our business gets more value from your skilled security personnel by enabling them to best apply their expertise and focus on the tasks that really protect your valuable information assets. Security teams feel happier, more valued, and less stressed in their roles. They see an investment in codeless automation tools as a sign that your business recognizes and wants to do something about the strain put on them in a labor market that falls short on security skills.

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