Top 6 Cybersecurity Skills to Hone For Career Success
Cybercrime is becoming a rising threat to organizations worldwide. Cybercriminals can exploit companies and consumers by stealing valuable data, including names, passwords, credit card details, and other confidential information. Cybersecurity has become essential to tackle such criminal activity and ensure that private and sensitive data remains secure.
In today’s time, cybersecurity has become more integral than ever because of increased exposure to attacks in organizations, newer hacking methods, and increased cybersecurity threats faced by individuals. Cybersecurity can not only protect personal information, but it can also protect a business’s reputation, enhance productivity, assist remote working, regulate compliance, and save costs. However, integrating cybersecurity into your operations is more challenging than it may sound. Instead, you must learn specific cybersecurity skills to achieve career success. Some of these skills are mentioned below.
6 Cybersecurity Skills For A Successful Career
Application security development
It’s high time that companies and individuals start realizing the importance of DevSecOps. Businesses must begin hiring security people skilled in DevSecOps to work closely with the engineering teams to ensure sufficient functionality and security of products and information. Application security development refers to building security within a product. It’s an action that usually falls outside the business units’ security control. Most businesses solely focus on keeping the bad guys out rather than promoting the product’s security. Hence, application security development is a highly essential skill to strengthen cybersecurity.
Application security reduces risks from internal and third-party sources, maintains the brand image by keeping businesses off the headlines, and keeps customer data secure. Further, it protects sensitive data from leaks, builds customer confidence, and improves trust from crucial investors.
Cybersecurity is a trending concept that is attracting significant attention. If you wish to establish a career in cybersecurity, consider pursuing an Online Bachelors in Cybersecurity to gain a more detailed knowledge of relevant concepts and skills. What’s best is that online degrees provide the convenience of pursuing studies alongside seeking employment opportunities.
Cloud Security
Cloud security tools are vital for building secure pathways for interaction between the application and the cloud. It’s an essential cybersecurity skill that is being increasingly explored by thousands of companies worldwide. Thus, many businesses seek employees familiar with the underlying infrastructure of public and hybrid cloud platforms, including Azure, AWS, and others. Moreover, companies demand security professionals familiar with cloud breaching tactics to help them monitor and overcome such schemes.
Cloud security solutions offer 24/7 visibility, higher availability, adequate protection against DDoS attacks, and advanced threat detection. Further, cloud security takes faster time to market, provides scalability and flexibility, cost savings, better collaboration, and network segmentation.
Penetration testing
Penetration testing, otherwise called ethical hacking or a pen test, is an organization’s deliberate attempt at cyberattack to test, identify, and seek out vulnerabilities in the computer system’s software. The primary objective behind penetration testing is to identify a potential threat to a company’s data and security. However, several experts also use penetration testing to test a company’s overall robustness to security controls and measures.
Penetration testing is an essential cybersecurity skill because it helps you prioritize your risks, trains developers to mitigate risk possibilities, uncovers vulnerabilities, determines attack vector feasibility, meets compliance, and improves security response time. Furthermore, it ensures business continuity, allows you to gain a third-party expert opinion, helps maintain trust, and matures your environment.
Many companies dealing with highly sensitive data run pen tests regularly to ensure efficient security and require skilled experts for this specific job. Penetration testing is also necessary before integrating new software or updating an existing one. Hence, understanding the know-how of penetration testing and its techniques can significantly uplift your profile as a cybersecurity expert.
Risk assessment
Every cybersecurity expert must know how to perform a risk assessment to help companies steer clear of as many vulnerabilities as possible. Risk assessment is the process of identifying weak points in your system and then working towards lowering those risks. Penetration testing and AI-powered systems are part of risk assessment methods, where you identify possible vulnerabilities and find solutions to improve your company system.
Risk assessments offer security against breaches, provide you with data to prioritize improvements, and help guide your security investments. Additionally, risk assessments document and review security control, meet industry compliance, determine the scope of the risk assessment process, and help you understand your ability to address a security threat.
Several companies are using AI systems to gather millions of data from several sources to evaluate and detect abnormal activity. AI tools are an incredible source of risk assessment providing better security, duplicative process reduction, protection against data malware, and security authentication.
Network security
Network security is one of the most basic cybersecurity skills every professional must have. It is essential to understand that knowing the basics of how networks work is integral to mitigating cybercrime and threats to your company’s system.
A network security individual is responsible for curating network architecture that protects companies against cybercrime. Therefore, understanding IT infrastructure and other relevant IT skills is imperative for designing an efficient and interconnected network.
Network security builds trust, protects proprietary information, and enables a more modern workplace. Further, boosted network security can lead to increased profits, improved productivity, enhanced compliance, and increased customer confidence.
Digital forensics
It’s possible that even after multiple attempts and actions to prevent hacks, hackers can still hack into your system and steal confidential information. Here is where digital forensics comes into essence. Following an attack, digital forensics professionals try to recover lost data, determine the source of the assault, and upgrade cybersecurity protections.
Learning digital forensics is crucial because it aids in the recovery, analysis, and preservation of computers and aids in determining the motive for the crime. While all cybersecurity experts should understand digital forensics, you can also specialize in this discipline.
Wrapping up
The demand for cybersecurity-skilled individuals is skyrocketing as access to technology increases, and digitization takes over traditional business processes. Studies show that people often consider cybersecurity secondary because they need more awareness, leading to a significant talent shortage. However, understanding and learning cybersecurity are integral to rising cybercrime levels and threats. What’s better is that you can make a lucrative career out of your cybersecurity skills because of the heightened need for security professionals.
