Bridging The Cybersecurity Skills Gap With Efficiency

Uploaded on 2024-01-03 in TECHNOLOGY--Resilience, JOBS-Training, FREE TO VIEW

The industry shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals is putting organizations under massive strain across the board. Cyber threats are constantly evolving, contributing to this problem by driving increased demand for highly specialized skills.

In turn, this leaves organizations in a vulnerable position as security teams lack the resources needed to react proficiently to emerging attacks.

The global cybersecurity workforce is experiencing steady growth, but supply is still lagging behind demand. According to The 2023 ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study, there is still a huge shortfall in talent, with 4 million professionals needed to adequately safeguard digital assets. At the same time, 47% of cybersecurity professionals have dealt with cutbacks to their teams in the form of layoffs, budget cuts, and hiring or promotion freezes.

This talent shortage has become a massive hurdle for organizations due to the limited personnel available to operate a security operations center (SOC).

The cybersecurity skills gap remains a critical threat to the industry, and organizations need to explore new approaches to achieve greater efficiency within their operations. Recruiting, upskilling, and retaining talent is key to ensuring that an organization can continue to protect its critical systems from any form of cyberthreat. The technology and maintenance of security platforms go hand-in-hand, so the ability to retain employees with efficient easy-to-use software is critical.

Investing in a cloud-based security information and event management (SIEM) platform provides a simple and flexible solution to alleviate pressure on security teams, operate with optimized efficiency, and accelerate their technical capabilities. Organizations can ensure efficient adoption by looking towards SIEM partners that focus their innovation efforts on product design, ease of use and product delivery. By doing so, they gain an efficient security solution that saves engineering resources by managing the uptime of the platform.

Rising Demand For Cybersecurity Skills

The cybersecurity skills gap alone presents a massive challenge for organizations. When combined with the modern threat landscape, it creates the perfect storm for threat actors looking to take advantage of overwhelmed security teams.

The increased frequency of high-severity threats, such as ransomware and phishing means organizations are more likely to have critical data compromised. Security teams are left to defend against more attacks without any additional support in place. This has the potential to lead to higher rates of employee burnout and turnover, further widening the cybersecurity skills gap for organizations.

In an age of rising risks, stretched teams should be focusing on high-level threat hunting activities instead of the development and maintenance of the infrastructure itself. If security teams don’t utilize the right technologies that align with their needs, they will be missing out on the opportunity to maximize their threat response.

Security teams lack infinite budgets, and it is increasingly important for organizations to evaluate the total cost of ownership of cloud-native SIEMs compared to self-hosted SIEMs. As cloud SIEM platforms draw from operational budgets rather than capital budgets, it is vital that organizations take the time to determine what represents the best investment profile for their business.

Achieving Efficient Cloud-Based Security

Cyber efficiency has never been more important for security teams. When faced with cybersecurity talent limitations and complex modern threats, organizations need an intuitive cloud SIEM platform to alleviate common challenges regarding budget constraints, threat management, and workload capacity.

Deploying a cloud-native security platform allows overwhelmed security teams to gain full visibility into their security environments and increase productivity. Leveraging a cloud-native platform enables organizations to take advantage of:

Simplified Setup: Deploying a cloud-native SIEM platform enables security teams to get started without having to undergo time-consuming hardware configurations or software installations. Instead, this is overseen by the platform provider. All security teams need to do is import log data, and the platform is ready to go. Organizations gain an efficient solution that removes pressure on resources. Security teams can hit the ground running with seamless deployment and expert support to remove operational challenges.

Comprehensive Visibility: Cloud-native SIEMs provide full visibility into hybrid environments that are increasingly becoming the norm, leaving few gaps and decreasing mean-time-to-detect (MTTD). Security teams can configure the sources for any log in a cloud-based SIEM to accurately capture all event data, as well as configure alerts and create custom reporting templates to enable maximum visibility. Organizations benefit from reduced time needed to protect against threats with a platform that can easily identify, analyze, and remediate threats.

Streamlined Incident Response: Cloud-based SIEM platforms enable threat detection engineering with the ability to test analytics rules and confirm they are fine-tuned and optimized for an organization’s specific environment. The platform can trigger automatic alerts through case management to replace manual processes that can be prone to errors. When each case is created, any logs attached to that observation will be automatically attached to that case, enabling quick access for further investigation.

Automated System Updates: Making upgrades to security systems can be a tedious task. By deploying a cloud-based SIEM, improvements and updates to the platform are handled by the vendor, further cutting down on the complexity and workloads of analysts. Enhancements from the cloud can be continuously delivered without security teams needing to take action. This all works towards closing the cybersecurity skills gap by enabling teams to work faster with more time to focus on the most critical tasks.

Powerful Partner Support: By deploying a cloud-based SIEM, organizations gain the expertise of a dedicated team to serve their specific business needs. It is imperative that organizations select a SIEM partner that is committed to continuous improvement and innovation. This enables them to stay ahead of evolving risks and threats, and benefit from continual advancements moving forward.

Empowering Scalable Cybersecurity

Investing in a cloud-based SIEM is an effective way of gaining a real competitive advantage against cyberattacks and empowering overstretched organizations to run smaller SOCs. Choosing an innovative and adaptable SIEM partner is essential to providing security teams with the support and confidence to boost their efficiency and reliability.

By embracing innovative cloud-based solutions, organizations can successfully navigate the cybersecurity skills gap and ensure the protection of their critical assets in an increasingly interconnected world. Organizations gain a smart and scalable platform that has efficiency at its core.

Kev Eley is Vice President Sales UK and Europe at LogRhythm

Image: wocintechchat

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