Talent Challenges in Cyber Security Cause Shift In Role Sort

In response to our clients and candidates in technology, across industries, we share insight that addresses “talent in tech.” Below follows an excerpt from a recent McKinsey piece titled “The unsolved opportunities for cybersecurity providers.” You can read the full piece here.

Cybersecurity-talent gap

With more than 3.12 million jobs in cybersecurity estimated to be unfilled in 2021, the talent shortage is a massive problem, and it’s affecting both clients and providers. The use of technology—primarily AI and its machine-learning offspring—has helped slightly, especially in a security-operations center dealing with an active cyberattack. But the technology is primarily supplementing security analysts, allowing human capacity to be more efficient and to focus more on tasks where their experience and creativity are essential. Addressing the talent gap takes innovation and persistence:

 Recruiting realities. ‍

To manage the skill gap, cybersecurity providers may want to focus on offerings that are not as people intensive to deploy and manage or maintain. To remain talent competitive, providers should get creative when it comes to recruiting, training, and retaining talent, such as looking beyond traditional places, finding individuals with similar skills sets that can be trained, looking beyond formal education, and so on.‍

More one-shop and full-stack-service providers.

Companies are moving away from the approach of product-delivery deployment and moving toward annual subscription models that include service delivery.

Impact of delivery preferences on customers’ key buying factors.

Delivery preferences are critical. For example, the rate of false positives has historically been a top buying factor in several security-product markets, for a logical reason: the more false positives, the more frustration and manual effort for security-operations teams to trudge through every day. However, as the delivery of those products has shifted to a service-driven approach, buyers care less about false positives because they no longer see level-one and -two data. Instead, the triage stage is outsourced almost entirely by the product provider’s service team. Buying preference moves farther right along the value chain to the value and actionability of the intelligence, response time, and so on.

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