Leveraging the Power of Community to Transform the Cybersecurity & GRC Industry

We are in a time marked by the convergence of the digital, physical, and biological worlds, all with additional accelerators such as advanced robotics and cognitive-thinking systems. Fast-paced innovational waves or big-bang disruptions have triggered an accelerated adoption of automation, the effects of which will be fast, hard to detect, and harder to defend. According to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2020, it may cost the jobs of 85M workers, most displaced by a shift in the division of labor between humans and machines. However, 97 million new roles could emerge, and while it might be exciting to think of transformational new jobs, we cannot ignore the fact that millions of people will be left behind. The Cybersecurity and GRC industries are dangerously understaffed and have issues keeping pace with the speed of technological change. We lack diversity across the board and have created a workforce monoculture that has left us ill-equipped to address threat agents that are diverse by design. We need a new way of thinking to solve both issues, and it rests in "community." In this lecture, we will discuss our forecasts of technological advances over the next few years, the type of workforce necessary to protect and defend these new systems, and how to leverage our local communities to build a new, more diversified cybersecurity workforce trained with a set of futureproofed skills.