How Can We Realise Cyber Resilience Through Education?

Uploaded on 2023-05-18 in TECHNOLOGY--Resilience, JOBS-Training, FREE TO VIEW

In today's global and interconnected economy, the importance of cyber resilience cannot be underestimated. It is no longer about securing networks and devices but about providing trust in the increasingly complex technologies and processes that societies rely on. Education in the profession matters.

The launch of the UK Cyber Security Council’s certification mapping tool is set to provide cyber professionals with useful resources to better understand the requirements for their desired career path. This further highlights the benefits of educational programs, as it provides a roadmap for their security careers and ensures that they are equipped with the knowledge needed to succeed and aligned to a specific role they would like to secure in the future.

Creating Rounded Professionals

We all understand the benefits of educating cyber professionals so that they are able to create robust systems and identify and prevent cyber threats. What continues to be a challenge is educating those in cybersecurity so that they understand risk and can translate that risk into a strategy that gets buy-in across the business or organisation.

Cybersecurity has risen well up the ranks of risks that senior business leaders think about, becoming a major concern for CEOs and boards. Concern, however, needs to be translated into proper action, and this requires having people with not only technical competencies but business leadership skills that can enable and drive change across a whole enterprise.

One of the practical ways in which cybersecurity education can improve to deliver this is through a greater focus on understanding risk-based approaches to cybersecurity and learning how to work cross-functionally with business unit leaders and senior executives to enact and drive a strategy forward.

At the moment, this is lacking. As we continue to develop cybersecurity education programmes and frameworks, we need to ensure that there are modules and certifications that bring together the technical and the strategic. Cybersecurity practitioners need to understand how they translate the strategies and processes they are responsible for into something that the wider organisation wants to implement. Without these skills, cybersecurity approaches will never reach the point of creating cyber-resilient organisations.

Bringing Industry & Academia Together

Given the interconnectedness of the global economy, no single entity can solve cybersecurity challenges alone. One of the criticisms that has been levelled at cybersecurity education frameworks is that there is not enough industry involvement in the delivery and sharing of knowledge, and this is something that needs to be corrected.

One of the reasons why bringing people with academic and real-world insight together is so important is because implementing a cyber resilience strategy is both a complex and also very human process. There are multiple pitfalls over which efforts can stumble or get completely waylaid. There need to be opportunities to learn best practices and then understand how they react to reality and how cyber professionals can ensure their cyber resilience strategies stay on track.

This is going to include understanding how to work with board members and the CEO, how to engage leaders of locations in other countries, and how to influence from the shop or office floor all the way to the top. These can all be challenging conversations, and understanding first-hand how someone successfully went about them and achieved what they set out to do can help to demystify what, on the face of it, is a daunting task.

Building A Digitally Secure Future

Education is key to developing the cybersecurity leaders of tomorrow and ensuring that businesses are equipped to navigate the complex and ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity threats.

By investing in a holistic education journey, it will be possible to develop a more secure digital future. However, this is only going to be achieved if the cyber community understands how to move past a profession focused on securing technology to one of delivering global resilience.

Will Dixon isDirector of Academy and Community at ISTARI

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