Become a Cyber-Resilience Expert: The Future Looks Bright

Safeguarding clients’ personal data causes a great many IT experts up at night, and with a good reason. There’s an ever-growing number of hackers who work tirelessly night and day, trying to steal priceless information wherever they can.

When inadequately-protected data gets hacked, the reputation of the company that was supposed to protect it takes a serious hit. Client confidence is shaken. In fact, very few organizations can withstand such an attack without collapsing.  

According to Mathieu Brossard, an independent cyber-resilience expert, data leaks don’t always come outside intruders. “The truth is, you never know where a problem may come from. You always have to be wary of hackers of course, but leaks can also come from within your organization. One careless or malicious employee could just as easily be at the heart of a data leak. Whether we like it or not, the lure of easy profits often trumps ethics and the law. We can’t just sit around hoping that everybody is trustworthy. It’s imperative that organizations protect themselves from their own employees, as well as from outside intruders.”

In the face of this reality, organizations are more vulnerable than ever and have no choice but to invest large amounts of time and money to protect their data and prevent the catastrophe that cyber-theft can cause. But is that enough?

Resilience: The Primary Goal

Regardless of all the effort, it’s almost impossible to totally avoid cyber-theft or data leaks. Today, the goal of organizations is no longer to simply prevent a cyberattack, but most importantly, be as resilient as possible when one occurs. Ensuring the continuity of business operations and minimizing the impact of a malevolent act has become the primary goal. Resilience, more precisely cyber-resilience, is now vital to every organization — small and large.

Cybersecurity has proven to be very effective when it comes to protecting IT infrastructures. Unfortunately, it does not take into account the entire ecosystem of IT protocols or the human element. Employees themselves are often at the root of a given system’s shortcomings. Machines are practically infallible. It’s the people who use them that make it possible for hackers to do their dirty work. As pointed out by Marco Manglaviti, Incident Response Lead at Deloitte, he explains “the need to build resilient systems which leverage bleeding-edge technologies and innovative solutions is the foundation upon which cyber-resilience is built. Hackers will continue to compromise organizations by exploiting human factors throughout the process. As we continue to build increasingly complex systems, ensuring the shift of the human element from the traditional ‘weakest link’ in the cybersecurity chain to the strongest one is ever more critical.”

Cybersecurity on its own simply can’t protect an organization’s data. It has to be supplemented with the monitoring of protocols and human activity to ensure effective and complete protection. Indeed, experts acknowledge that the two domains are inseparable. In the words of cyber-resilience advisor, Paul Berthier from RHEA, “…cybersecurity and cyber-resilience are intimately linked; you can’t have one without the other. It would be an illusion to think that a system can be effectively protected without taking into consideration the multiple elements surrounding IT infrastructures.”

Having read all that, it should come as no surprise that cyber-resilience experts are very much in demand these days. But even though the demand is high, the current supply is insufficient. Not enough people have been trained for this new field.

Cyber-Resilience Expert: The Job of the Future

For cyber-resilience experts, the job prospects are abundant. The question isn’t whether they’ll find work; but rather, where they’ll choose to apply their new skills. Expertise in this domain is in such high demand and the number of prospects is so few that companies and organizations are literally stealing experts from one another. So, if you consider yourself a “computer geek” at heart, and you want to secure your professional future; CCE has the perfect program for you — the Cyber Resilience Diploma.