Communications of the ACM
The Security Skills Shortage Is Worse Than You Think
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Enterprise employers and security specialists are increasingly growing concerned about what some see as a deepening skills shortage in the information technology (IT) security field. According to ESG Research, 83 percent of enterprise organizations with more than 1,000 employees claim that it has become difficult to recruit and/or hire badly needed IT security professionals.
ESG points to three major trends that have exacerbated the already short supply of highly trained professionals. First, there is the skill deficit among existing IT security workers, many of whom now fill roles that extend beyond their existing expertise, especially in network security and newer fields such as cloud computing, security virtualization, mobile device security, and analysis/forensics. Moreover, the security staff that organizations have are often under extreme time and manpower pressures. With too few professionals and too much work to do, many IT security departments are striving just to keep up with everyday security issues, let alone long-term threats and vulnerabilities. Compounding these first two trends is the emergence of powerful and versatile security tools that sacrifice automation and ease of use for deep customization that IT professionals are often too unqualified or pressed for time to fully exploit.
From Network World
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