Security skills gap increases, raising cyberattacks fears

Agencies are struggling with a worsening cybersecurity skill shortage while confronting the rising threat levels of cyberattacks fears, in accordance to a new study by Crowd Research Partners, an agency that produces peer-sourced market research reports.

A survey of more than 1,900 security experts indicated that more than half (54%) say they anticipate that hackers will victoriously launch cyber attacks on their organizations in the next twelve months.

Heightening the alarm over all of this is the increasing skills gap in IT security. A separate study from the Center for Cyber Safety and Education that was recently issued discovered that gap will grow to as many as 1.8 million IT security workers by the year of 2022. That is a 20% increase from the 1.5 million IT security worker shortfall that was assumed by the center in 2015

The 2017 Cybersecurity Trends Report, produced in partnership with various cyber security vendors, also indicated that 46% of organizations surveyed for the research are boosting their security budget, by an average of 21%.

The focus areas where companies will increase security spending involve cloud infrastructure (33%), training/education (23%) and mobile devices (23%).

That study’s findings mirror outcomes of a study issued this week by Thales, a security services vendor, and 451 Research, which found that 81% of U.S. healthcare organizations and 76% of global healthcare agencies will increase information security spending in the year of 2017 to tackle the cyberattacks fears.

To overcome security issues and develop a stronger security posture, 54% of organizations need to train and certify their current IT staff, the study stated. Internal training is followed by partnering with a managed security service provider (29%), and leveraging security technology solutions (27%).

To better handle the cyberattacks fears and decrease the threat of a security breach, companies prioritize 3 key capabilities including improved threat detection (62%), better analytical capabilities (43%) and threat blocking (39%).