How upskilling and training providers help close the cybersecurity skills gap 

The cybersecurity abilities hole is likely one of the most urgent challenges going through safety groups as we transfer into 2023. With analysis highlighting a shortfall of three.4 million cybersecurity staff, increasingly more organizations are turning to cybersecurity coaching and upskilling to boost their safety postures. 

This motion is driving beneficial investor curiosity in on-line cybersecurity upskilling and expertise evaluation suppliers like Hack the Field, which immediately introduced elevating $55 million as a part of a collection B funding spherical led by Carlyle. 

On-line cybersecurity coaching offers organizations with a medium to upskill junior staff in order that they don’t must compete over extra skilled professionals who’re in excessive demand amongst different organizations. 

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Hack the Field’s platform offers 1.7 million customers at 1,400 organizations the world over with academic content material and over 450 digital hacking labs, which customers can use to teach themselves on offensive safety and penetration testing. 

Upskilling out of the talents hole 

The announcement comes as increasingly more organizations are recognizing the worth of growing inner safety expertise relatively than hiring externally. Actually, 62% of organizations report that coaching improved their group’s cybersecurity effectiveness, lowering the variety of breach makes an attempt and general safety incidents. 

In relation to the format of safety coaching, steering on offensive safety, moral hacking and penetration testing is especially beneficial because it provides practitioners the experience they should proactively establish and mitigate vulnerabilities earlier than an attacker has an opportunity to take advantage of them. 

“On this quickly transferring, ever-evolving menace panorama, safety groups have to deal with the talents that matter and take a extra adversarial strategy,” stated Haris Pylarinos, founder and CEO of Hack the Field. 

“This implies hiring a staff of moral hackers to defend in opposition to cybercriminals by in search of out and discovering a company’s vulnerabilities first. The fact is, the one technique to beat an attacker is to suppose and act like one — which is why moral hacking is so essential to fixing the talents hole and placing an finish to cybercriminal exercise,” Pylarinos stated. 

Pylarinos additionally notes that, extra broadly, moral hacking offers organizations with entry to an untapped pool of extremely expert cybertalent who may also help to plug the talents hole and safe more and more advanced environments. 

Cybersecurity-training rivals 

One in every of Hack the Field’s principal rivals available in the market is Immersive Labs, which raised $66 million in funding in October 2022, and provides safety groups a platform for frequently testing and measuring cyber resilience, with defensive and offensive upskilling coaching content material and workout routines tailor-made towards government, cybersecurity, and danger and compliance groups. 

One other key competitor is Offensive Safety, which provides a set of on-line sources together with programs on penetration testing, cloud safety, safety operations, exploit growth and software program safety. Offensive Safety additionally provides a penetration testing service to assist enterprises check their operational resilience. 

Nonetheless, in response to Pylarinos, the primary differentiator between Hack the Field and these rivals is its emphasis on offering customers with hands-on workout routines to deal with real-world hacking issues. 

“Perseverance and outside-the-box considering are the core hacking abilities that type true consultants, not memorizing handbooks and blindly following directions. Our platform builds a hacker mindset that helps gamers receive the muscle reminiscence wanted when going through an assault,” Pylarinos stated.