With the explosion of the Internet and the rise of digitalization in business, adversaries have new and growing
opportunities to compromise organizations. It’s no secret that cybercrime is growing. Across all countries and
industries, this has driven a threefold increase in demand for cyber security professionals in recent years. With
the global shortage of cyber security experts said to be around two million, and with over half of all
organizations taking six months or more to fill cyber security posts, we have a serious problem on our hands.
Furthermore, a third of organizations that are breached, experience loss of revenue, all of which makes a
convincing business case for organizations to develop and maintain practical in-house skills.
The problem is that lecture-based cyber security training is known to have limited return on investment because
it fails to promote the real-world hands-on skills required to combat tomorrow’s cyber threats. Many cyber
security courses are between one and five days long and leave the student with only notes to take home.
What’s evidently required is a continual cyber security training program, covering all security domains, that
teaches students at all levels how to protect business assets, detect adversaries and respond to incidents.
Trainees don’t want to learn the basics and they don’t want to be spoon fed either. They demand focused, up-to-date, lab-based exercises. They want to utilize the skills learnt through the training program to help protect
their organization. Executives don’t want to invest in training that doesn’t directly help protect their critical
business assets either. They seek validation that their training investment is directly benefiting the organization
and optimizing risks through the effective enablement of protective, detective and response capabilities.
