One reason for cybersecurity risks being particularly acute for many businesses is due to an absence of the right employees with the optimal skill set. This is drawn out from a Cyber Threat Readiness Report from the company Swimlane.
The report demonstrates there is a lack of executive understanding and an ever-widening talent gap that is placing an unsustainable burden on security teams to prevent business-ending breaches.
Respondents of the report indicated increased challenges in finding candidates with the right technical skills, experience and industry-specific knowledge. Seventy percent of companies reported it takes longer to fill a cybersecurity role now than it did two years ago. When asked how long it takes to fill a cybersecurity role, 82 percent of organizations report it takes three months or longer.
In addition, 34 percent of companies report that it takes seven months or more. These challenges have led one-third (33 percent) of organizations to believe they will never have a fully-staffed security team with the proper skills.
The research also found that alarming levels of employee turnover and burnout pose a substantial risk to businesses, jeopardizing their operational stability and resilience. More than nine out of 10 participants reported business issues resulting from security team turnover, including slower threat identification, response and remediation, and the inability to address alerts.
Is automation the solution to the diminishing skill set?
The research findings highlighted that people alone cannot solve the issues plaguing today’s cybersecurity teams. Organizations that are successfully meeting these challenges head-on are augmenting the expertise of the people on the security operations (SecOps) team with strategic technology investments. Over three-quarters (78 percent) of organizations that handle every alert indicated they use low-code security automation in their security stack.
Furthermore, ninety-eight percent of participants said there were advantages to using security automation solutions that embrace low-code principles, such as the ability to scale the solution with the team’s experience with less reliance on coding skills. The report’s author – Swimlane – offers an Automation Readiness & Maturity of Orchestrated Resources (ARMOR) Framework. This is a standard for security automation maturity designed to help organizations understand, implement and mature security automation for better outcomes.
According to Gartner: “It is commonplace for SOAR technologies to offer low-code-like functionality. This makes programming and workflow improvements more accessible to all members of the security operations team even if they do not have a lot of programming experience. While SOAR continues to offer a lot of features for “power users,” these individuals can have broader responsibilities for automation across the organization.
“Power users can develop their own integrations and often reuse existing code/scripts. SOAR is then used to help build out more repeatable playbooks, allowing organizations to utilize this code based on the building blocks that already exist in the technology.”
