10 Cybersecurity Professions Which Are in High Demand

I found many people get confused in my whole years of experience when they hear the term ‘Cybersecurity’. Many people think that it is something related to the hacking world or cybercrime. And many of them don’t have an idea about this. Cybersecurity is a vast well matured, organized, and developed area in IT. If you look for cybersecurity jobs at job searching platforms like Linkedin, Glassdoor, and Jooble, you will realize the demand for Cybersecurity professionals in today’s world. We thought it would be good to bring some information about the Cybersecurity profession in the current world to answer the people who have various questions about cybersecurity.

What Is Cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity is a collective term that refers to a technique, skills, process, procedure, and practice that provides the greatest protection to the networks, servers, assets, information, and data from an attack, theft, leak, damage, and unauthorized access.

A job of a typical cybersecurity professional is to protect either any or all of the business entities. That doesn’t mean that just protecting business elements is the only job of a cybersecurity professional. There is a lot more than that. In this article, we are going to list most of the cybersecurity professions which are in high demand.

1. Incident Response and Forensic Analysis Engineer:

The prime responsibility of this engineer is to handle the security incidents, breaches, failures, and compromises and react to them as quickly as possible. Since they deal with security incidents, they should be available round the clock. These engineers work in a team known as the Security Operation Center (SOC). Most of the time, they are busy monitoring the events on the network, servers, assets, and other elements and detecting anomalies and suspicions. Whenever a cyber attack like phishing, brute force and other attacks launches on the Organization, they are the one who stands in the front line to face a threat. Responsibility doesn’t end there; their work demands them to be experts in threat hunting and forensic analysis.

2. EndPoint Security Engineer:

These engineers are employed to maintain the health of the whole infra. They deploy anti-malware applications on each endpoint device like servers, workstations, and network assets and push the latest security updates to the endpoint devices from the centralized management server. They are also responsible for implementing certain corporate policies created by GRC Team on end devices and users. These engineers make sure no malware infections are up to date and healthy.

3. Governance, Risk and Compliance (Grc) Consultant:

Commonly they are known as security auditors. They conduct periodic internal audits against security best practices, identify security gaps in the infrastructure, calculate the risk factors, and develop business continuity plans for any failures. They make sure other infra teams are maintaining disaster recovery systems. Basically, they review the work of all other cybersecurity engineers and ensure everything is compliant. When they find a new risk, they transfer the risk to the business teams and engage them until they close that particular risk.

4. Penetration Tester or Ethical Hacker:

These professionals are called white hat hackers. They try to hack the network, applications, and systems like a real hacker and expose the vulnerabilities and exploits before the real hackers do. That’s why they are also called Red Team. This is one of the services which organizations often outsource as it is believed that it gives more accurate results than if a pen test was done by an external resource. They don’t just do pen tests and go; they also give a comprehensive report which has detailed recommendations to fix the vulnerabilities and exploits with best-hardened practices for the business teams.

5. Identity and Access Management Engineer:

As the name says, these engineers manage access management systems. The team’s main function is to manage the identity of the users and set the proper permission levels to their accounts to avoid unauthorized access. They create different user roles, different access policies, and permissions to different identities in the Organization to maintain a healthy business. Ideally, each new application deployed on the network would integrate with the IAM system to better manage the user access to the application. Although it plays a small role in the cybersecurity echo system, it plays a vital role in securing the organizations.

6. Security Architect:

This cybersecurity profession holds a more responsible job than any other cybersecurity professional. They have to design, costing, deploy, implement, solution, and troubleshoot the entire security system. Their job needs a lot of work experience, knowledge, and problem-solving capabilities. They should be in a position to not just identify the greatest problems in the security echo system but also provide multiple ways to tackle the particular problem, and provide a best-suited solution for the business to fix the problem in a cost-effective way. This role is not suitable for fresh starters.

7. Network Security Engineers:

Network Security Engineers are hired to securely regulate the in and out of network, web, and data traffic to and from the Organization. These engineers spend most of their time monitoring the outbound traffic, configuring rules on the firewalls to regulate network traffic, implementing access policies for employees, block non-business and malicious traffic entering the internal network. They need to be available 24×7 as they need to support the incidence response team if any incident is reported and protect the Organization from being compromised by blocking malicious traffic.

8. DevSecOps Engineer:

Basically, they are developers; their prime job is to develop the application with no vulnerabilities. But, they also need to scan the developed application for vulnerabilities and fix them to avoid being exploited. They use various tools to scan the application as they are not security experts. They just do static code inspection and dynamic runtime behavior scans and try to fix the vulnerability in the best possible way.

9. Security Operations Manager:

Like other project managers security manager has to manage several things to run the cybersecurity teams. Their prime work includes resource management, service delivery, increased engagement among the cybersecurity teams, and developing a service improvement plan. The security Manager reports to the Chief Information Security Officer and ensures everything is in control and up to date. Managing Cybersecurity teams is not an easy task; it needs a lot of technical and management skills. This role is not for freshers.

10. Chief Information and Security Officer:

Chief Information and Security Officer (CISO) is an executive person responsible for an organization’s information and data security. His main responsibility is to manage governance and direct the cybersecurity teams to secure the Organization from cyber threats. A CISO takes inputs from the Security Operations Manager and Cybersecurity Teams and helps the board to understand the security updates, security position, potential security threats, challenges, and feature goals of the organizations. CISO closely works with Security Architecture and Security Operation Manager to develop plans, and goals, and roll out new software(s) and hardware(s) required to full fill the needs of the cybersecurity teams.

Wrap Up:

Different organizations follow different strategies and structures to manage security systems. Large organizations keep these functional areas discrete. They maintain a separate team to manage. But, small companies hire engineers who can cover multiple functional areas. It is up to the Organization how they design their cybersecurity teams. Growing technology leads to growing cyber threats as cyber growing cyber threats give birth to various functional cybersecurity professions. Emerging technologies like IoT, Machine Learning, Quantum computing, Cloud, and Blockchain may create new security challenges which give way to new cybersecurity professions.

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