Happy New Year. After a year of uncertainty and emotional stresses, I look to 2021 with great optimism. The cybersecurity community is significantly stronger and being counted on now more than ever. The need for cybersecurity talent has grown exponentially. The importance of cybersecurity professionals is universally understood and appreciated at a much higher level.
We as a community are treating each other better too! It’s wonderful to see our cybersecurity leaders working together the way we all are. Our response to recent breach announcements shows us that we have learned to support each other. I remember when Equifax shared their breach a few years back, the CISO at the time was attacked and ridiculed. Fast forward a few years to the FireEye/SolarWinds breach; the cybersecurity community has been kind and supportive to the cybersecurity leadership victims. It’s awesome to see this advancement in our ability to provide empathy and support vs. blame and shame. We are one team and we all can be breached… We are defending against more attackers than we have defenders and therefore we must work together. Thank you for bringing this empathy and kindness to the cybersecurity community; we will attract and retain more talent, to include diverse talent when we come from a place of empathy and kindness.
Below I have highlighted five contributing factors that we predict will lead to significant growth in the cybersecurity job market in 2021. Please feel free to reach out anytime. CyberSN is 100% focused on solving your cybersecurity talent challenges.
Cloud computing has provided attackers with a larger set of potential exploitable targets prior to the digitalization shift. Increases in new or past rapidly planned cloud deployments has created additional opportunities for attackers to elevate privileges, add persistence, and breach credentials and data. Managing cloud cybersecurity risks to accelerate business operations, data privacy, and compliance will be critical roles in 2021.
Cybersecurity spending is projected to increase in 2021. CISOs will revisit and revamp cyber strategies addressing potential threats and detection/defense gaps introduced by remote workforces, authentication threats, on-premise office infrastructure, cyber hygiene, supply chain threats, and cyber awareness.
Data-driven approaches will begin to solidify threat and incident analysis, threat anticipation, and breach response practices. Data-driven cybersecurity will influence decisions on “normal patterns'' versus anomalies and provide insights from all cybersecurity data, visualizations, and reusable models. All of this will inform adding intelligence, automation, and measurable value.
Cybersecurity programs will leverage Application Security Engineers and DevSecOps professionals to focus on integrating automation to the development pipeline, rather than detecting software flaws. This proactive approach will enable them to manage risks which lead to security vulnerabilities in APIs, production software, and the overall architecture.
The rapid shift to digitalization has added data access complexity as well as less visibility and potential blind spots for SOC analysts and Cyber Fusion teams. Recent breaches have reminded the cybersecurity industry that alerts from defense products should not be the time to begin searching for breach indications. Organizations will reinforce their cybersecurity playbooks by enhancing or adding proactive approaches which will include threat hunting and threat awareness.
As the new year unfolds, so too does the unique challenges that present themselves to us. This is especially true in the cybersecurity industry. As quickly as we develop new, bolstered proactive processes and technologies to minimize potential breaches, new threats are born and introduced to challenge those very efforts. Thus, as we stated in our intro here, we must work collaboratively to create success as a collective whole. Cybersecurity isn’t only an industry, it’s a community, and we as cyber pros are each a thread in that ever-growing fabric. When we band together, that fabric becomes stronger, and with that, success is more easily accomplished. CyberSN is dedicated to the successful advancement of the cybersecurity workforce. Let’s work together and make 2021 the best year yet!
