Kaspersky finds companies invest more than $100K yearly to upskill cybersecurity teams

Woburn, MA – March 21, 2023 — A recent Kaspersky study has found over 70 percent of businesses pay more than $100 thousand dollars for additional annual training to keep skills of their cybersecurity employees up to date. However, the surveyed companies also highlighted that there was a lack of relevant courses covering new challenging spheres in the educational market, and stated that training does not always bring them the expected result.

According to the research, companies are investing significant amounts in upskilling their cybersecurity teams with 43 percent of organizations saying they usually spend between $100,000 and $200,000 per year on information security courses, while 31% even invest over $200,000 for training programs. The remaining 26 percent state they usually pay less than $100,000 for educational initiatives.

Further, the research also revealed that many cybersecurity professionals (39%) believe corporate training is not enough. In order to stay competitive in the market and keep knowledge and skills up to date, they are willing to pay for additional training courses with their own money.

However, cybersecurity practitioners also note that the educational market is struggling to keep up with the rapidly-changing industry and fail to deliver the necessary training programs on time. The research shows that the scarcity of courses covering new challenging spheres (49%) was the main problem for those searching for cybersecurity training.

47 percent of respondents also stated that trainees tend to forget what they learned because they had no opportunity to apply newly-acquired knowledge, and therefore the courses were impractical to them. The need for special training pre-requisites such as coding and advanced mathematics, which were not specified at the pre-registration stage were also problematic for 45 percent of practitioners.

“With a constantly evolving threat landscape, businesses should continually improve the skills of their cybersecurity personnel in order to be well prepared for sophisticated cyberattacks,” said Veniamin Levtsov, vice president for the center of corporate business expertise at Kaspersky. “Developing high-profile specialists within the company and building internal expertise can be an effective strategy for organizations that aim to retain existing employees and allow them to grow professionally, instead of constantly hunting for new candidates and checking their professional backgrounds and practical skills. For organizations served by Managed Service Providers it is also important to maintain a pretty high level of expertise internally and use the same language when discussing the scope of services and Service Level Agreement with them.”

To effectively upskill cybersecurity teams, Kaspersky experts recommend the following:

• Invest in quality cybersecurity courses for the staff to keep them up to date with the latest knowledge. With practically oriented Kaspersky Expert training, InfoSec professionals can advance their hard skills so they can defend their companies against attacks.
• Use interactive simulators to test employees’ expertise and assess the way they think in critical situations. For instance, with the new Kaspersky interactive ransomware game they can observe the way the company’s IT department deploys, investigates and responds to an attack, and makes vital decisions with the game’s main character.
• Provide your InfoSec professionals with in-depth visibility into cyberthreats targeting your organization. The latest Threat Intelligence will supply them with a rich and meaningful overview across the entire incident management cycle and help to identify cyber risks in time.

The full report with more findings on the global shortfall of qualified InfoSec professionals is available via the link.

About Kaspersky

Kaspersky is a global cybersecurity company founded in 1997. Kaspersky’s deep threat intelligence and security expertise is constantly transforming into innovative security solutions and services to protect businesses, critical infrastructure, governments and consumers around the globe. The company’s comprehensive security portfolio includes leading endpoint protection and a number of specialized security solutions and services to fight sophisticated and evolving digital threats. Over 400 million users are protected by Kaspersky technologies and we help 240,000 corporate clients protect what matters most to them. Learn more at usa.kaspersky.com.

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Cassandra Faro

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