Desperately Seeking IT Security Experts
In case you missed it last week, Evernote, the online note-taking app, was hacked, and, If you're an Evernote user, you've probably already changed your password. I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for the hacker(s) to complete your To-Do list, though.
Unfortunately, Evernote hasn't been the only high-profile victim, even this year. As CNET has it:
Evernote is just the latest company to suffer at the hands of hackers. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter have all been victimized recently. And of course there were the high profile hacks at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal that helped prompt President Obama to sign an executive order on cybersecurity. [source]
Though it wasn't necessarily a network management failure in the Evernote case, it would be unreasonable or naive not to expect more stories of similarly high-profile, enterprise hacks to continue to break in the future, which should explain what ComputerWorld was also reporting last week:
Demand for information security experts in the United States is outstripping the available supply by a widening margin...A report from Burning Glass Technologies, which develops technologies designed to match people with jobs, shows that demand for cybersecurity professionals over the past five years grew 3.5 times faster than demand for other IT jobs and about 12 times faster than for all other jobs.
In 2012, there were more than 67,400 separate postings for cybersecurity-related jobs in a range of industries, including defense, financial services, retail, healthcare and professional services. The 2012 total is 73% higher than the number of security jobs posted in 2007, Burning Glass said...
The two most sought-after jobs by employers were information security engineers and security analysts. Close to one in three of all computer security jobs advertised last year were for information security engineers. Nearly 25% of the job postings were for security analysts. [source]
IT security is a big deal. Products, services, and information repositories that we could only imagine a couple decades or even years ago depend on increasingly expansive physical and virtual networks that require protection from more-and-more sophisticated potential threats. If your enterprise doesn't have a comprehensive IT security plan, let the high-profile hacks mentioned above be an inducement to develop one quickly. But how can you secure your network when you're understaffed and undersourced?
SolarWinds can help.
Check out our recently published SolarWinds Whitepaper, "IT Security Management Checklist: 9 Key Recommendations to Keep Your Network Safe" for network security insight and recommendations, and then check out the network management and log & security management products mentioned for quick and cost-effective IT security solutions .
