Security teams continue to hire despite economic uncertainty

The cyber talent shortage is a greater concern for CISOs than ongoing economic uncertainty, according to the latest Information Security Maturity Report from ClubCISO and Telstra Purple.

Insufficient staff is named as the top (51 percent) concern for CISOs when asked which factors most affect their ability to deliver against their objectives.

Over half (52 percent) of CISOs say that they expect to expand their team this year with only five percent anticipating a down-sizing. The next biggest concern for respondents is the culture of the organization (31 percent), highlighting that people/cultural challenges are still considered to have more impact on the ability to deliver against objectives than macro challenges such as budgets (29 percent), the supply chain (25 percent), and the economic downturn (22 percent).

The report also shows that CISOs recognize the value of diversity, 78 percent say they believe that it is beneficial to bring different perspectives into the business, while improving culture (54 percent) and fostering greater innovation (48 percent) are the next most common reasons.

ClubCISO advisory board member, Kevin Fielder, says, "In security teams, it's encouraging to see diversity being viewed as an opportunity, and something that needs to be pursued actively to meet the challenges we face going forward. The report highlighted real ingenuity from CISOs who are now looking at diversity from a range of vectors including cultural, racial, educational and professionally diverse backgrounds."

The vast majority (84 percent) of respondents feel confident or very confident that their organization has a strategy in place to offer equality of opportunities for candidates, there is a wider spread of opinions on how best to actually recruit these diverse teams. CISOs are hiring most from culturally/racially diverse backgrounds (60 percent), but the next highest-scoring strategy was recruiting from educationally diverse backgrounds (48 percent). Recruiting candidates from professionally diverse backgrounds was almost as common (47 percent) but focusing on gender diversity is rarer, with only 36 percent giving it specific focus.

The full report is available from the ClubCISO site.

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