New year, new jobs? Cyber security job predictions
More jobs to come
This is the obvious one, with jobs predicted to increase and the skill gap to widen, between now and 2020. The interesting prediction is what sector these jobs will be in. Cyber jobs now exist in companies that have not invested heavily in risk management, such as retail and manufacturing. You don’t have to work for a bank or a consulting firm to make an impact. Travel, entertainment, infrastructure and hospitality will all hire cyber professionals in 2016.
Disruptive technology fuels growth
Cyber analytics are becoming more widely used and technology that takes the guess work away, such as machine learning, are continuing to grow. Candidates who have skills in these areas, such as Splunk, Hadoop or big data, coupled with cyber knowledge, will be in high demand and will be commanding large pay increases.
Consolidation in the vendor space
Many cyber vendor companies will look to grow their market share, especially as investors will be starting to look for the large returns they have been promised. Larger vendors will launch and grow their cyber offerings and will be able to scale quickly. Services such as SIEM, APT and ASoC will all grow in this competitive space and those in cyber sales jobs will need to position themselves accordingly. As such, we could see considerable movement from senior sales people who look to ensure they are with the best employer.
Cyber managed services increases number of jobs
As vendors and consultancies alike move more aggressively into the managed services space, those in cyber jobs, with the right skills, will be required. Candidates who are SIEM architects, security architects, incident response consultants or investigators will continue to be in demand.
Cyber policy hits board level
We predicted this one last year, and have seen a dramatic rise in CISO salaries that suggests the start. CISO’s will increasingly report into the board and will need to be able to articulate the business risk that cyber poses, as well as the technical aspects. As cyber jobs, in general, remain very much about a technical skill-set, senior cyber professionals will need to articulate that to the rest of the business better than ever before. CEO’s will need to know if their data is encrypted and what that means, especially if they are required to make a public statement in the aftermath of a cyber attack. 2016 may just be the year of the CISO.
How did our predictions fair in 2015?
Cyber warfare as a reality? We predicted an increase in hiring from the government and that the conversation on cyber would become international. With the hack that hit Kaspersky rumoured to have cost millions, the spies are now the spied on. The UK government pledged millions to hiring additional cyber jobs at the end of the year and many companies that were hacked, found their attackers were overseas. Doesn’t look like we did too badly!
Breaches are the norm? It would appear so but the TalkTalk hack suggested that customers were not as aware of the implications as they could have been and that they really did want to vote with their feet. Hackers are using stolen data to commit more traditional or complex fraud than before and consumers were not prepared, or willing to accept this.