SEPTEMBER 2022ENTERPRISE SECURITY| | 19With the year-over-yearincrease of cybersecurity incidents, the demand for cybersecurity professionals has equally increased. A recent survey of over 1,200 IT leaders found that 60% struggled to recruit cybersecurity talent and 67% identified the lack of qualified candidates created greater risk to the company. In fact, 80% indicated that at least one data breach was attributable to the cybersecurity skill gap. There are simply not enough cybersecurity professionals and will require cybersecurity leaders to develop several strategies to address demand.REDUCE DEPENDENCE ON STAFF PERFORMING TRANSACTIONAL TASKS BY USINGAI/ML AND AUTOMATIONOne effective strategy associated with the cybersecurity talent shortage is to rely less on staff and more on intelligent automation. Cybersecurity staff personnel, mainly operators, spend an incredible amount of time pouring over logs and alerts, manually hunting for and remediating threats. As an alternative, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML) powered threat identification, detection, and response ­ which learns and continually improves ­ can reduce analytical effort and improve situational awareness.Cybersecurity staff, analysts and operators alike, also desire to be liberated from time-consuming, routine, transitional tasks so they can focus on more important work. Complementary to AI/ML, Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) solutions and tools that allow organizations to optimize cybersecurity operations in threat and vulnerability management, incident response, and cyber operations automation. SOAR solutions can save operational cycle-time, reduce manual errors, and allow cybersecurity staff to focus on important activities. In both cases, the investments can save both time and effort while potentially improving retention through more challenging and rewarding activities than deary and mundane tasks.At Regeneron, we made the investment in applying SOAR-like automation technology in a novel manner. Our centralized security monitoring and alerting platform provides alert feeds to our security incident response case management tool that, in turn, creates security tickets based on predefined rules. Using Robotic Process Automation, we use orchestrators and bots to monitor their assigned ticket queues to perform standardized procedures, such as blocking spam or cleaning malware from devices, to free up our human staff to deal with the more complex security incidents.SUPPLEMENT RETAINED STAFF WITH STAFF AUGMENTATION AND MANAGED SECURITY SERVICESPROVIDERSMany cybersecurity leaders have overcome staffing shortages through a mix of staff augmentation and managed security service providers (MSSPs). Staff augmentation can include arrangements with service providers or by contracting with independent contractors to provide technical assistance or subject matter expertise. As a strategy, this approach has several advantages to address the shortage of cybersecurity professionals. Under the staff augmentation model, contracting for temporary requirements and disengaging once those requirements have been met is significantly faster than the time to identify, recruit and hire staff. Staff augmentation requires minimal contracting effort, can scale up or down quickly, and has minimal impact on the existing operating model of a cybersecurity organization.The MSSP model differs from staff augmentation. An MSSP offers a set of defined security services CXO INSIGHTSA CISO CHALLENGE: CYBERSECURITY TALENT SHORTAGEBy Mark Leary, Chief Information Security Officer, Regeneron PharmaceuticalsMark Leary
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