Half of organizations lack the security talent needed to remain secure

By Anthony Spadafora 

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The global shortage of cybersecurity talent is having a detrimental effect on businesses with nearly 50 percent of organizations lacking the necessary talent to remain secure, according to new research from Trend Micro.

The cybersecurity firm surveyed 1,125 IT decision makers in the UK, US and EU to reveal that 69 percent of organizations believe that automating cybersecurity tasks using artificial intelligence (AI) would reduce the impact from the lack of security talent.

Trend Micro's report comes at a time when 64 percent of organizations have experienced increased cyber threats in the last year.

Today's IT security teams are understaffed and overextended as they deal with an increasing number of security alerts. To make matters worse, the challenge of what to prioritize along with the shortage of expertise in the area can be overwhelming for these teams as it introduces risk.

Automating cybersecurity tasks

Of those surveyed, 63 percent of IT decision makers plan to leverage AI technology to automate their security processes. However, automation alone is not enough to handle such a daunting task and trained cybersecurity professionals are still needed to analyze the results and manage the overall security strategy of their organization.

Demand for cybersecurity professionals is expected to remain high with Gartner predicting that the number of unfilled cybersecurity roles will grow from 1m in 2018 to 1.5m by the end of 2020.

Cybersecurity architect at Trend Micro Ian Heritage provided further insight into the report's findings, saying:

“Protecting the enterprise from cyber threats is like a game of whack-a-mole. Not only do IT and security teams have to maintain constant vigilance on their cyber defenses, they also have to communicate these risks to business leaders to ensure sufficient budgets, and don their HR hats to recruit the necessary skill sets. The CISO’s role is harder than ever before and the demand has never been higher for automated and hosted solutions.”