How to prepare for the future of cybersecurity

Matthew White Partner, Digital Trust Leader, PwC Middle East 27 July, 2021

Middle East CEOs are ready to spend more on cybersecurity to build resilience, respond to attacks in real time, and hire the skilled people they need.

With successful COVID-19 vaccination programmes under way, organisations in the Middle East are hitting the ground running as they reset businesses to meet new customer demands and expectations. It’s becoming clear that the top three areas of investment for CEOs will be in digitisation, cost efficiencies and cybersecurity & data privacy. 

The first leads naturally to the second and third – more digital processes and services will make companies more streamlined, but they also open up potential risks. The good news in my experience is that corporate leaders in the region are aware of the risk and ready to act – in fact 43% of respondents to our 2021 CEO Survey plan to significantly increase spending on cybersecurity and privacy (by 10% or more) over the next three years.

CEOs also know what they want to spend money on: measuring risk and putting in place solutions that will detect and respond to attacks in real time, to build resilience from within. In addition, more than half of business, security and technology executives we surveyed in the latest Digital Trust Insight survey also plan to hire more cybersecurity staff, particularly people with expertise in cloud solutions, security intelligence and data analysis. 

However, one of the biggest challenges for organisations, not only in the Middle East, is the lack of employees with the needed skills.

So how can organisations turn their cybersecurity ambitions into reality? 

As a first step, you need to hire cybersecurity specialists with expertise that is complemented by broader business and social skills. Understanding the scale and severity of future cyber threats requires insight into your overall goals and a willingness to collaborate with colleagues to anticipate risks across all business divisions and functions. 

A substantial proportion of executives have grasped this: around half of our Digital Trust Insights respondents are looking to hire creative, adaptable cybersecurity staff with good communication skills. 

Another way to expand the cybersecurity expertise in your organisation is to tap into your local talent pool and invest in their upskilling. The Middle East has a large, young population of digital natives who are eager to improve their skills in order to advance their careers - in fact 86% of respondents to our 2021 GCC Hopes and Fears survey of employees said they are ready to learn new skills or completely retrain in order to remain employable in the future. Creating ‘gamified’ training programmes, led by cybersecurity specialists, helps students apply their learning to real-life challenges they will face at work, with rewards towards tangible business results.

Business and tech execs in the region are already spending three or more hours a week on work-related learning, according to the Digital Trust Insights survey, and bolstering that knowledge by following thought leaders online, networking in similar circles, and consulting with technology vendors.

Ever-evolving threats

Finally, reputable managed security services providers can deliver a readily available, highly skilled cybersecurity workforce when organisations do not have the resources to compete for the talent they need, or the experience to train up their own experts. 

The best managed services providers continually invest in hiring and upskilling to ensure that their teams can offer world-class protection against cyber threats and leaks. Their cybersecurity platforms are also constantly evolving to keep up with the latest developments in areas such as networks, cloud computing, data processing, visualisation and machine learning.

One of the biggest lessons for me over the past year, and one that I think is shared almost universally, is that none of us really know what is coming our way. Business leaders had to shift focus to control losses and then to ensure resilience in the immediate period of pandemic disruption, followed by a pivot to digital transformation to put organisations back on the path to growth. These massive and fast transformations have to go hand in hand with increased cybersecurity measures, to ensure that cyber risks are a fundamental part of future business decision making.

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Matthew White

Matthew White

Partner, Digital Trust Leader, PwC Middle East

Tel: +971 056 113 4205

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