With demand for cybersecurity professionals rapidly outpacing the number of individuals with formal cybersecurity credentials, organizations are struggling to fill key roles. A survey from 2017 showed over 50 percent of companies reporting shortages in key cybersecurity skills, a significant increase over the 23 percent of organizations that reported shortages of these same skills in 2014.
While companies have attempted to maintain their employees’ skills base through continuing professional development, there are concerns that this training can be overly formal and academic, resulting in skills that are detached from real-world applications. Bruce Beam, chief information officer at (ISC)2, of this training, told Computer Weekly, “It is not like training someone to be a welder and giving them the basic skillset.”
Seeking to develop that real-world experience in advance of actual events and threats, organizations are increasingly turning to simulation, by running disaster management scenarios. These scenarios allow for skills development in a safe, contained environment, giving people the opportunity to try out new techniques and approaches, in advance of deployment against a real threat, using replicas of the actual networks and systems being protected. Within such environments, scenarios can vary from highly structured disaster recovery scenarios, to reacting to active probing from selected white hat hackers, and can support training at both the individual and organizational levels.
“I always go back to my military training and one of the things we learned was to train like you are going to fight, because you will fight like you train,” Beam told Computer Weekly, when speaking of the benefits of simulated disaster management,
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