How can cybersecurity be made attractive to any society grouping?

The Association for the Promotion of Innovation in North Madrid (Asociación para el Fomento de la Innovación en Madrid Norte: InnorMadrid), in collaboration with the Tres Cantos Entrepreneurs Association (Asociación de Empresarios de Tres Cantos: AETC) and the Fundación Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (FUAM), has put on the forum “New Advances in Cybersecurity and Blockchain”. The aim of the conference was to boost the levels of effective collaboration and technology transfer between the business environment and the knowledge-generating world of the university.

One of the most pressing and talked-about cybersecurity concerns at the moment is the growing and damaging shortage of persons with the right skillsets, forcing most firms to seek support from both the private and public sectors. Furthermore, according to Gartner, the number of unfilled cybersecurity roles globally is expected to rise from 1 million in 2018 to 1.5 million by the end of 2020. Taking his cue from this worrying situation, Javier Zubieta, Marketing and Communications Manager of GMV’s Secure e-Solutions sector talked at the forum about the importance of attracting talent to cybersecurity.

“My company above all else is human”. So did Zubieta define GMV at the beginning of his speech. In his opinion, one way of making cybersecurity attractive was to draw in budding talent to eyecatching projects. As an example he mentioned the award of the Spanish space industry’s biggest ever contract to GMV, consisting of the operation and maintenance of the Galileo constellation. Cybersecurity accounts for 30 % of this European Space Agency project, making it necessary to set up a specific cybersecurity unit with over 350 professionals at European level. But this is only one example of GMV’s ambitious and far-reaching cybersecurity projects. He likewise mentioned the project awarded by BMW for development of the precise positioning system of its autonomous vehicles, with design-up incorporation of cybersecurity and privacy.

Basing his speech on the five functions comprising the core of NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework (Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover), Zubieta commented on the hard and soft skills needed to fill companies’ cybersecurity vacancies. Under the heading of “Identify”, for example, he highlighted the importance of the CISO as the skillset most called for. This person needs to be a born negotiator, a communications expert with leadership skills in crisis situations.

We at GMV currently have over 200 vacancies, almost half of them related to cybersecurity, but our portfolio of thrilling projects and our determination to carry through each mission enables us to attract budding talent from any area of society and then retain these skills once trained up.

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