Entersoft gives you a peak into the world of career opportunities in the cybersecurity universe and what it takes to be part of it.
Fancy yourself to be like hacking wizard Lisbeth Salander in the award winning Swedish film series, Millennium Trilogy? Or like real life inspired technology genius Walter O’Brien from the show Scorpions? While real life may not be as dramatic, building a career in cybersecurity can be as exciting and rewarding, with new challenges for you to think about every day.
Cybersecurity safeguards individuals, companies, and even national security. An accelerating pace of digitalization and cloud adoption means many more sensitive personal or company assets now have an online presence. Either human error or inherent security loopholes can leave them vulnerable to data theft and its consequences. The threats from hackers and bad actors in cybersecurity are omnipresent, with the threat ecosystem evolving with technology sophistication. A smart security expert can help an organisation stay one step ahead of cyber criminals.
Is there a strong career path in cybersecurity?
Organisations are investing in building their risk posture and creating a robust security strategy as well as processes and teams to support these activities. This is no longer a nice-to-have for them, they need cybersecurity to live up to customer trust, protect their long-standing reputation, and stay in regulators’ good-books.
Capgemini Research Institute’s report estimates that by 2021, cybersecurity skills will witness high demand in 72% of organisations. While demand for cybersecurity professionals has tripled, there is a serious crunch with wide talent gaps. As per a workforce development survey Frost & Sullivan, 59 per cent of organisations have vacant cybersecurity positions, while forecasting a global shortfall of 1.5 million professionals by 2020.
Getting experience and exposure to a wide range of functions during the early days of your career can make all the difference, as this will help you understand the internal systems, technologies, processes and potential risks and impact from an organization’s point of view. This will also enable you to zero down on your particular area of expertise to deep-dive into.
There was never a better time to become a cybersecurity professional.
What are the kinds of roles can I look forward to in cybersecurity?
Cybersecurity is a constantly evolving domain, what with new threats emerging every other day. Gartner defines cybersecurity as the combination of people, policies, processes and technologies employed by an enterprise to protect its cyber assets. It can be further classified into IT security, IoT security, information security and OT security.
Broadly, career paths progress along roles in three key categories – Security Management, Technical and Leadership.
• Security Management involves an oversight into managing cybersecurity within the organisation. Under this umbrella, your role will comprise of enabling a strong security culture with periodic training and awareness programs for employees, conducting regular compliance and audit checks, assessing and managing risks associated with vendors / partner (third-party risk), as well as project management skills.Typical roles include
1. Security management – Senior Security Consultant
2.Technical – White Hat – Jr White Hat- Sr & Data Scientist
• Technical roles allow you to flex your muscle in hard-core engineering and operations areas. This field is filled with opportunities in the coveted areas of cloud security, identity and access management, ethical hacking, designing security systems as well as security operations. You can find out more about these roles by looking for designations such as Typical roles include
1. Senior Security Consultant
2. White Hat – Jr White Hat- Sr
3. Other Roles – Data Scientist
• Leadership emphasises on security by laying down the framework and governance including security policies, risk appetite and mitigation. They evaluate the organization’s position including the cost of cybersecurity impact to customers, compliance and regulation and advise on the security systems, technologies and skills needed. They also build the security culture in the organisation and are tasked with raising industry awareness of cybersecurity through thought leadership externally. This includes Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), Chief Privacy Officers and managers of enterprise-specific domains of security expertise.
Some exciting career profiles across cybersecurity include computer forensics, cryptanalysts and cryptographers, data protection officers, cybercrime investigators, penetration testers, security architect, security software developer, digital forensics and ethical hackers.
What are the skills I should have?
As a fresher, or someone looking to upskill into a role in cybersecurity, you’ll have several questions around what competencies you will need to succeed. Here’s a short list:
– Strong conceptual knowledge and practical skills in key technical areas is a must-have. Some of these include disaster recovery, security program development, device and app management, access control, analytics, audits and compliance, data management, etc. This will help you handle a wide range of security threats across hardware, software, platforms and tech.
– Developing analytical, troubleshooting skills: Thinking out of the box is an art that is developed consistently over time.
– Keeping abreast of developments in the threat landscape: This will help you anticipate and maintain a sharp eye to weed out some of the lesser-known security loopholes and plug them in time.
– Being a good communicator: Much of the time, customers, businesses, employees and partners don’t get technical speak. Being able to break down and explain concepts in an easy-to-understand manner will result in two-fold benefit – concrete steps taken by the organisation and knowledge of what to do in the future in a particular or similar situation.
The time is now – Cybersecurity is considered a key skill for the future
You’ve probably heard a lot about cloud, data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and these are very exciting fields of work. However, think about it, with all of these new technologies, and digitalisation only at its start, the volume and intensity of cybercrime attacks is exponential. Every organization will need an army of cyber security experts to protect them against the potential onslaught of cybersecurity incidents they will face, if they are not cognizant