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08 Dec Overcome the Cybersecurity Talent Shortage: 4 Tips for SMBs
As is an issue within any industry, the cybersecurity industry is being hit with a major case of supply and demand issues right now. But, the shortage isn’t a traditional resource, but rather a shortage of personnel — the IT field is currently going through a massive skills shortage, meaning that hiring cybersecurity talent can be both strenuous and expensive.
However, there are ways that your organisation can overcome these challenges. There are lots of different tools and methods that you can implement in your organisation to ensure that you have tight cybersecurity without needing to hire cybersecurity personnel to run your organisation’s security.
In this article, we’re going to go over the four best tips that you can use to overcome the current talent shortage in cybersecurity within your organisation, to ensure that you can still have a great cybersecurity posture.
Perform a Security Review to Understand Gaps
The first part of ensuring that cybersecurity within your organisation is at a high level is to perform a security review on your organisation to understand where the gaps in your security posture are.
Educating yourself on where you’ll find issues will help you patch those issues up and ultimately give you a better solution for cybersecurity. After all, the first step to ensuring you have tight security is understanding the parts of your organisation that need to be improved in regards to security, to make sure that they don’t become angles of attack for any malicious attackers.
Here are some of the key steps that you should take to ensure that cybersecurity is a top priority within your organisation —
- Review Policies: You should review your organisation’s policies and rules to ensure that no gaps can be exploited here.
- Review Compliance Standards: Another key step is ensuring that you’re meeting compliance regulations, as these will often include cybersecurity standards and breaching them will result in penalties and possibly litigation.
- Detail your organisation’s structure: Both your network structure and your personnel structure should be identified, to ensure that only those who need access to your organisation’s most sensitive areas have it and to make sure that your network is being managed correctly.
By conducting a review and identifying any gaps within your organisation’s security, you can ensure to fix them and keep a high-security standard.
Educate Employees on Security Best Practices
Another vital thing to do is educate your employees on the best security practices within your organisation. By doing so, you can ensure that everyone does their bit to maintain a high standard of security throughout your business, meaning that you’ll generally be able to keep any issues at bay.
Creating cybersecurity awareness programmes and training programs as well as fostering a cybersecurity-conscious culture inside your organisation will ensure that everyone has an idea of what it really means to be cyber secure, and will be able to take steps within their own routine to be able to prioritise cybersecurity.
This also includes personal security hygiene such as passwords, usage of shadow IT and external applications, and ensuring that they don’t fall victim to social engineering attacks and other cybersecurity breaches.
Make Use of Automated Detection and Response
A key role of cybersecurity personnel is to be able to identify and respond to cyber threats, but that simply isn’t required in the world of modern technology.
Endpoint detection and response (EDP) tools such as Microsoft Defender will be able to detect attacks in real-time and offer steps to respond with ease, meaning that you never have to worry about an attack or breach flying under the radar. Even silent attacks will be picked up, meaning you don’t have to worry about being attacked without your knowledge of it.
EDP will allow you to both hunt for threats with ease and quickly complete investigations into attacks and breaches, meaning that you can keep aware of all of the issues within your organisation. Plus, all of the reporting will be done in real-time, meaning that it’ll sound the alarm as soon as there is an attack, so you can ensure that you handle it before it does any serious or irreversible damage to your business.
Rely on the Assistance of a Trusted Provider
Unfortunately, hiring expertise is simply just expensive. Especially for SMBs, the prospect of hiring a cybersecurity expert when their demand is so high is ludicrous. However, teaming up with a trusted provider is the best way to gain access to that wealth of knowledge and assistance for a fraction of the cost.
A trusted provider will have a team of experts for you to reach out to at your disposal, meaning that you can ensure that you have support and advice whenever you need it. Plus, a provider will be able to help you much more flexibly, with around-the-clock support and a whole team if you require it.
Working with a trusted provider is simply the case of paying an operational expenditure rather than hiring someone into your organisation, which would require you to pay a wage and invest resources into that employee. This means that you can simply pay for cybersecurity assistance as a service — all of the benefits of hiring a cybersecurity professional with none of the hefty costs.
Working with a provider also gives you flexibility, as you can ensure that you’re only paying for what you need and nothing more.
How We Can Help
The cybersecurity skills shortage will make any SMB feel as though they can’t have cybersecurity expertise in their organisation, however, these tips will be able to help you ensure a high level of cybersecurity throughout your organisation.
If you’re looking to get started with a provider to ensure that cybersecurity within your organisation is sorted, reach out to our experts today. We’ll be able to provide you with a helping hand and ensure that everything you need is covered.
Contact us now and see how we can help you.
