Cybersecurity professionals are those who can enjoy and gain a lot of success in their careers as the state of the technology is evolving, and so are vulnerabilities and the number of cyber threats. Enterprises across all industry verticals are willing to pay handsome salaries to those professionals who can bolster their digital security.
Let us now understand the concept of cybersecurity and the cybersecurity skills experts need to make a mark in their careers.
What is Cybersecurity?
Cybersecurity refers to protecting internet-connected systems such as software, hardware, and other data from cyberattacks, identity theft, and data breaches and can also aid in risk management. An organization will be better equipped to prevent and mitigate cyberattacks if it has a strong sense of network security and a working incident response plan. Information security, a subset of cybersecurity, is designed to maintain the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of data.
Cybersecurity Skills to Be Mastered
Some of the notable skills to be mastered by any cybersecurity professional are:
1. Building a Well-Rounded Skillset
Building a well-rounded skillset includes skills such as IoT security, network security, penetration testing, access management, identity, and other soft skills related to cyber governance. This will help experts build upon their foundation and branch out into other roles such as leadership roles. Learning these skillsets is essential as there are many advanced persistent attacks such as ransomware and distributed denial of service that can easily bypass the feeble security provided by outdated technologies.
2. Security Analysis
This is an important designation in almost every company. There are many security professionals who have now started working as information security analysts. As revealed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of information security analyst jobs will increase to a great extent. Their responsibilities are increasing as there is an exponential increase in cyberattacks on businesses in the past few years. Hence, it is important for them to have a thorough knowledge of analyzing security options and building innovative solutions with the help of those options.
3. Risk Analysis and Mitigation
Identifying risks before threats actually occur is indeed a very useful practice. A cybersecurity expert will need to discover new risks, identify risks, and track identified risks. To foresee the kind of attacks that can befall a system, they need to have a keen sense of foresight and attention to detail and think of solutions to mitigate the problem. According to survey reports by several organizations, risk mitigation is one of the skills that many companies think of outsourcing in the years to come. This means that information security experts who have this skill will have umpteen number of job opportunities around them where they will be offered fat paychecks.
4. Soft Skills
Having adequate soft skills is a prerequisite for cybersecurity experts to climb to more advanced positions in their cybersecurity career ladder. The most important of all is communication skills as they need to communicate and teach complex subjects and concepts to people from non-technical backgrounds. Some of the other important skills one must have are:
- Ability to clearly articulate complex concepts.
- Excellent communication and presentation skills to communicate effectively with customers and management.
- Understanding, ability, and usage of active listening skills.
From a cybersecurity point of view, soft skills will let you identify examples and explain pervasive issues.
Conclusion
For any business, failing to maintain security can risk fines from government entities that are increasingly concerned about the way data is managed, apart from leaving data open to hackers which they can use for malicious purposes. Hence, to safeguard the data, networks, and applications of an organization, cybersecurity professionals must be able to understand security concepts and principles and must also be aware of the privacy and security regulations that are currently in place.
I hope you found this article useful. To know more about cybersecurity certifications and to become a cybersecurity expert, check out Global Tech Council.