FEATURE : DATA SECURITY
Future is female for data defenders
Mark Bowen , Editor of Intelligent CIO North America , says the future of the cybersecurity industry , and therefore the long-term protection of business data , is reliant on an increasing number of role models inspiring the next generation of female data defenders .
Companies across the globe are constantly battling with the long-term question of how they can continue to stay one step ahead of the cybercriminals .
It ’ s a commonly accepted fact that women are underrepresented in the IT and cybersecurity sectors . But what we don ’ t really know is what percentage of the cybersecurity workforce is made up of women .
There ’ s no doubt that IT leaders constantly need to consider how they keep ahead of the cybercrime curve .
Sure , there are options out there to help – with attacks increasing in speed , agility and sophistication , businesses would be well advised to utilize Machine Learning and AI in an attempt to radically reduce their risk .
There seems to be wide-ranging disagreement about this but most estimates seem to be that the cybersecurity industry workforce is made up of around 25 % women .
But what we don ’ t know is what role women are performing within the industry – I ’ ve heard reports that this number could well be inflated by the number of women working within administration .
Attackers are getting into systems , taking data and demanding ransoms much quicker than previously and there is no doubt that automation will help with the volume of speed of detections .
Even if we take the 25 % figure to be accurate it ’ s clear that women are massively under-represented and the question is then what are we going to do about it ?
Thankfully , in the days of reprehensible criminal activities such as Ransomware-as-a-Service , Machine Learning can support the often inadequate number of skilled employees a company has at its disposal .
But I can ’ t help feeling at some point that skills gap is going to become an absolute chasm and the cybersecurity of the vast majority of companies , and therefore the security of all of their critical data , is going to come under ever-escalating threat .
So what is the long term solution to ensuring the effective , long-term protection of everyone ’ s data ?
As well as possessing a comprehensive understanding of an evolving threat landscape , an ability to be able to detect and respond to threats swiftly and successfully is a leading priority . Not surprisingly , this requires extra hands-on deck but where are these going to come from ?
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