How the Economy, Skills Gap and Artificial Intelligence are Challenging the Global Cybersecurity Workforce 2023

Cybersecurity professionals are facing greater pressures than ever that diminish their ability to defend institutions and organizations around the world from ever-increasing threats.

Dealing with emerging challenges with grave consequences is not a new phenomenon for cybersecurity professionals. However, our study shows that a perfect storm of economic uncertainty, rapidly emerging technologies, fragmented regulations and ever-widening workforce and skills gaps is creating huge uncertainty for a profession whose role it is to protect global infrastructure and systems from attack. The cybersecurity workforce needs more support and investment from leaders across the public and private sectors.

This piles on top of nearly three years of rapidly evolving business and threat environments that started with cybersecurity professionals securely transitioning their organizations through accelerated work-from-home and cloud services deployments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And critical vulnerabilities across entrenched platforms continue to be exploited throughout the IT services and software supply chains. When war broke out in Eastern Europe, the conflict in Ukraine ushered in a new era of cyber warfare.