Tips for Overcoming the Cybersecurity Talent Gap

In this blog, we explore:

• Hiring mobile app security development professionals (and keeping them) is tougher than ever, with a small hiring pool and talent that is in extremely high demand.
• An effective way to overcome this talent gap is by utilizing tools that provide a pain-free integration process and automate security capabilities like code hardening, RASP, mobile app security testing, and threat monitoring.
• Leveraging a full suite of easy-to-use, integration-friendly mobile app security solutions will enable your organization to improve your mobile app security posture, decrease training costs and onboarding time, and streamline security across different teams.

Hiring cybersecurity talent (and keeping them) is tougher than ever. The U.S. Bureau of Labor stats pegged over 2.72 million unfilled cybersecurity positions as of 2021. But instead of over-exerting your teams to fill this talent gap, there are resources you can turn to.

Utilizing mobile app security solutions that provide automated capabilities — with a focus on pain-free integration–will enable you to produce greater efficiency and productivity with less effort. Or in other words, work smarter, not harder.

In this blog, we dig into the potential causes of this cybersecurity talent shortage, the right solutions to help you overcome it, and what capabilities these tools should have.

The cause and effects of the cybersecurity talent gap

With a small hiring pool and the increasing number of opportunities cybersecurity experts have, finding cybersecurity talent (and keeping them) is no easy feat.

In part, the small hiring pool could be the result of a record-low unemployment rate in tandem with a potential recession — making job seekers more selective and wary when taking on new roles.

In addition, the cybersecurity market is growing rapidly. Its global revenue is predicted to show a 13.33% increase per year, potentially reaching $298.70 billion by 2027. The number of unfilled cybersecurity jobs worldwide grew 350% between 2013 and 2021, from 1m to 3.5m, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. They also predict that in five years, the same number of jobs will still be open.

The result is twofold: First, software developers end up taking on a large part of the security responsibility. Despite their qualifications, software developers are not security experts and may not be up to date on the latest issues in the market.

Second, the pressure to deliver functionality on time will often result in security issues being relegated to the end of the development cycle where they get less priority and attention.

Unless businesses find a way to work around the talent gap, understaffed teams and overcommitted software developers ultimately result in detrimental mistakes, frustrated teams, and low morale.

Utilize solutions to overcome the talent gap

An effective way to overcome the cybersecurity talent gap is by utilizing tools that have the required security expertise built into the product. However, the most important part of this is not simply adding more tools to your tech stack. The tools need to address the security knowledge gap, but they also need to be seamlessly integrated into existing development flows, and have their security capabilities as automated as possible.

Your organization can develop a security architecture to protect, test, and monitor your mobile app without over burdening your development teams.You can leverage a full suite of mobile app security solutions that provide testing, code hardening, runtime application self-protection (RASP), mobile app security testing (MAST), and threat monitoring capabilities.

What your mobile app security tools should do

With the right solutions, you will quickly start to benefit from the increased efficiency that comes from better tooling and automation. When you leverage the types of mobile app security solutions mentioned below, you can help your understaffed and overcommitted development teams, as well as standardizing and streamlining your security architecture across different teams.

Your teams will be enabled to work smarter, not harder.

Bring automation to mobile app security

Mobile application protection solutions like DexGuard and iXGuard automatically inject RASP checks to prevent malicious actors from attacking your apps at runtime. This alleviates the need for your team members to manually insert code to defend against running on a rooted device, implementing certificate checks, and hook detection. Automation has key benefits: It gives developers time to work on more complex tasks, produces less error-prone code, is easier to maintain and scale, and last but not least, is more robust since the checks can be inserted automatically and randomly in different parts of the app every time a new build is generated.

A mobile app testing solution like AppSweep enables you to swiftly integrate security testing into your continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) process with automated scans performed with each build. You’ll never reach the end of your development cycle and face a large backlog of security issues that need to be addressed before release, as they’ll be quickly addressed as they surface during the development cycle.

You can also automate portions of your mobile app security monitoring processes with a threat monitoring solution like ThreatCast. ThreatCast can be integrated with fraud detection systems by providing automatic and mobile specific alerts related to your apps in the wild.

Integrate security with ease

Mobile app development and security teams are often plagued with schedule pressures to deliver their app to market. And with teams struggling to keep up with less-than-ideal employee numbers (i.e. the talent gap), this causes a delay in implementing security measures until the end of the mobile app project. To mitigate this, Guardsquare’s solutions are developed to be as easy to integrate as possible.

Since our runtime and hardening protections, once set up, are continuously and automatically applied during the application code compile process, no ongoing code changes are required in your app or SDK. As a result, developers can deploy our advanced mobile app protection solutions with similar effort required for adopting simpler, less sophisticated solutions.

Getting started with full spectrum mobile app security

To learn more about keeping your organization safe during the cybersecurity talent shortage, check out this whitepaper that focuses on how development teams can better work with security teams toward a common purpose.