Failing to attract security experts may prove costly for businesses

A new report from Kaspersky Lab has found that large businesses that struggle to attract sufficiently skilled security experts end up paying up to three times more to recover from a cyber security incident.

The much talked-about skills gap in the security industry continues to cause problems for businesses, as increasing wages, a general shortage of expert availability and the need for more specialists are all prevalent.

This skills shortage is being brought about by today’s rapidly expanding threat landscape, with businesses highly motivated to grow their security intelligence to help guard against costly security incidents. In fact, the improvement of specialist security expertise is one of the top three drivers to additional IT security investment for a third of businesses.

Sixty eight point five percent of companies expect an increase in the number of full-time security experts, with 18.9 percent expecting a significant increase in headcount. However, this growing demand is being held back by a lack of available specialists and increasingly complex requirements.

To help solve the problem, Kaspersky has issued a call to action for the security industry, citing the importance of higher education and research and development efforts to aid the effective sharing of intelligence in the form of threat data feeds, security training and services.

By combining security solutions and intelligence, businesses can spend less time fighting fires and focus on strategic security development and countering advanced threats.

"In this evolving industry, the relationship with our customers already goes beyond the shipment of a technology or a product", says Veniamin Levtsov, vice president of Enterprise Business at Kaspersky Lab. "We need to provide them with the skills and training required to identify on-going attacks. Detailed knowledge about attacks on other businesses, in the form of intelligence reports, is also necessary, along with actionable, machine-readable data about on-going threats. Solving the different challenges of threat prevention, the detection of targeted attacks, incident response and prediction requires a lot of flexibility. As a security vendor we are dedicated to increasing the quality and size of the expert security workforce around the world".

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