In a survey released today, Tripwire found that security professionals believe their teams are understaffed and that skilled cybersecurity workers are harder to find. The survey, conducted by Dimensional Research, examined how organizations are addressing the cybersecurity skills gap. The vast majority, 80 percent, of respondents believe that it is harder to find skilled cybersecurity professionals and 93 percent say the skills needed to be a “great security professional” have changed over the past few years. The survey also found that 85 percent of respondents believe their teams are understaffed, and only 1 percent believe they can manage all of their organization’s cybersecurity needs. Unsurprisingly, 93 percent say they would benefit from an outside organization’s help when it comes to security. “The skills gap issue continues to worsen,” said David Meltzer, chief technology officer at Tripwire, “which is troubling, since cybersecurity threats only continue to grow. Additionally, security teams are in search of new skillsets to deal with evolving attacks and more complex attack surfaces as they include a mix of physical, virtual, cloud, DevOps and operational technology environments. It’s becoming more difficult to maintain critical security controls, and there are fewer people available to do it.”
