​The security industry changes daily. And it’s fair to say that cybersecurity is changing even more rapidly as new threats, new attack methods, and new technologies continuously emerge. This means that cybersecurity professionals need to stay up to date as the threat landscape rapidly evolves to ensure that they are ready to meet the challenges of modern- day data security. Here, we look at some of the major issues that these professionals will be tasked with over the course of the remaining year and heading into 2017.

Brexit. In a historic decision in June, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union (EU)—a decision commonly known as Brexit. Approximately 52 percent of the population voted to leave the EU, while 48 percent voted to remain—including all of Scotland and a large portion of the population in Northern Ireland.

While immediate concerns were focused on the economic upheaval, Brexit will also have an impact on data sharing and data privacy agreements that the United Kingdom was previously part of as a member of the EU and its digital single market.

One major area of regulation that will need to be ironed out is around the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is scheduled to go into effect in 2018. It creates new privacy rights for EU citizens and requirements for businesses that handle EU citizens’ data (for more on this, read “Cybersecurity” from our August issue).

When the United Kingdom exits the EU, Britain may no longer be subject to the GDPR and may have to adopt its own framework. 

Furthermore, the EU and the United States had negotiated for months to create the Privacy Shield program, which was designed to replace the Safe Harbor agreement that was previously ruled invalid by the EU. The United Kingdom’s exit from the EU, however, means that it may not be covered by Privacy Shield—which went into effect earlier this year.

Brexit could also be the catalyst to create a different framework altogether, says Yorgen Edholm, CEO of Accellion, a private cloud solutions company based in the United States.

“The one EU effort we have looked at very carefully is the new Safe Harbor agreement—Privacy Shield,” Edholm says. “I think the United Kingdom can say, ‘We have two options; we’re going to piggyback off of what the EU is doing, or we’re going to do something else with the United States.’”

Talent shortage. Another major concern related to Brexit is whether the United Kingdom will be able to recruit talented cybersecurity workers. A recent study highlighted the lack of “digital skills” among people in Britain, which has looked to the EU to recruit employees to fill the void, according to a report by the Science and Technology Committee that was presented to the House of Commons earlier this year.

“Removing a flow of talent and expertise from Europe could deprive U.K. tech companies of an essential ingredient for sustained growth,” the International Business Times reported before the Brexit referendum. “Additionally, given that Britain’s tech scene—especially in London—is quite multicultural, start-up founders worry that leaving the European Union will make it much harder to hire the best employees.”

And this is not just a U.K. problem. Globally, 94 percent of executives reported that they are having trouble finding skilled candidates for cybersecurity jobs, according to a recent survey by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA). 

This problem, which is not a new one, is unlikely to go away anytime soon. The 2015 (ISC)² Global Information Security Workforce Study projected that by 2020, there will be 1.5 million unfilled information security positions. 

“Signs of strain within security operations due to workforce shortage are materializing,” the report explained. “Configuration mistakes and oversights, for example, were identified by the survey respondents as a material concern. Also, remediation time following system or data compromises is steadily getting longer.”

This, in turn, results in IT security professionals increasingly cornered into a reactionary role of identifying compromises and addressing security concerns as they arise, instead of proactively mitigating the contributing factors, according to the report.

To combat this, many information security departments are increasing expenditures on security tools and technologies, and for managed and professional security service providers to augment existing staff.

However, more needs to be done to attract qualified workers to the cybersecurity industry. One new effort to do this was announced by Cisco earlier this year. The company will invest $10 million in a Global Security Scholarship and make enhancements to its security certification portfolio to help close the industry skills gap. 

“Many CEOs across the globe tell us their ability to innovate is hampered by their security concerns in the digital world,” said Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn, vice president and general manager of Cisco Services in a statement. “This creates a big future demand for skill sets that don’t exist at scale today. We developed this scholarship program to help jump-start the development of new talent.”

The scholarship is a two-year program that is designed in partnership with Cisco Authorized Learning Partners to address the critical skills deficit and provide on-the-job readiness needed to meet current and future challenges of network security, according to a press release. As part of the scholarship program, Cisco also plans to offer training, mentoring, and certifications that align with the job of an analyst in a security operations center.

Scholarship awards became available on August 1 and are available to applicants who meet certain qualifications until the end of July 2017. To be considered for a scholarship, applicants must be at least 18, proficient in English, and have basic competency in one area, such as three years of combined experience in approved U.S. military job roles or Windows expertise.

Part of Cisco’s efforts will also concentrate on diversifying the IT security workforce so it includes veterans, women, and those just at the start of their careers. Reaching this audience is critically important, says David Shearer, CEO of (ISC)².

“New young people are not coming into the workforce,” Shearer explains. “That’s not a one- or two-year fix. Only 6 percent of the industry is below the age of 30. That’s a train wreck.”

Instead, the median age for information security professionals is 42, and workers are 90 percent male. These individuals are working longer hours, which can create problems with burnout and may cause many to move into a different career path “because the grind of the pace of the work is too much.”

Accountability. The talent shortage, paired with the rise of cyber incidents, is also placing additional pressure on IT and security executives to communicate actionable data to their boards of directors—or risk termination, a new report says.

Research of U.S. corporations by Bay Dynamics, a cyber risk analytics company, found that “59 percent of board members say that one or more IT security executives will lose their job as a result of failing to provide useful, actionable information.”

This may be because boards are placing an ever-higher value on cybersecurity, with 89 percent of board members reporting that they are very involved in making cyber risk decisions for their organizations. 

Twenty-six percent of board members also reported that cyber risks were their highest priority, while other risks, like financial, legal, regulatory, and competitive risks were termed “highest priority” by only 16 to 22 percent of surveyed members.

Coupled with that, the report found that 34 percent of board members indicated that they would provide warnings that improvements in reporting would need to be made before firing an executive.

But the report also highlighted “significant contradictions, such as while the majority (70 percent) of board members say they understand everything they’re being told by IT and security executives in their presentations, more than half believe the data presented is too technical.”

Overall, however, the report shows that boards are engaged and holding IT and security executives accountable for reducing risk, said Ryan Stolte, chief technology officer at Bay Dynamics, in a statement.

“Companies are headed in the right direction when it comes to managing their cyber risk,” Stolte explained. “However, more work needs to be done. Part of the problem is that board members are being educated about cyber risk by the same people (IT and security executives) who are tasked to measure and reduce it. Companies need an objective, industry standard model for measuring cyber risk so that everyone is following the same playbooks and making decisions based on the same set of requirements.”

Encryption. By the end of this year, 65 to 70 percent of Internet traffic will be encrypted in most markets, according to a report by Sandvine, an intelligent broadband networks company. This year, 2016, was a major milestone in the life of encryption as companies from Apple to Facebook to Twitter to cloud service providers to WhatsApp embraced encryption across the board.

However, this move has ramifications for corporate security, which can’t always see what’s happening in its network due to encrypted traffic, and for law enforcement as it loses its ability to gather certain kinds of digital evidence—an issue the FBI terms “Going Dark.”

“The issue for us is the inability to get access to digital evidence,” says Sasha Cohen O’Connell, the FBI chief policy advisor for science and technology. “This is not a situation where the U.S. Department of Justice is looking for new authorities; it is about exercising the authority we already have…and our inability to access content data, even with due process.”

To combat this, the FBI has gone to court against private companies to demand access to encrypted data, such as when it filed suit against Apple to gain access to an iPhone 5c used by one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters.

It has also been encouraging companies to use a form of encryption it terms provider access—where, for example, the data is encrypted on a smartphone but the smartphone’s manufacturer has the key to decrypt that data if it’s served with a court order to do so.

This approach, however, has been met with criticism by technical experts who say that introducing that access point into encrypted data is making it vulnerable. 

“Academically, they are correct,” O’Connell says. “Any entry point, no matter how managed, does introduce vulnerability. Of course it does. But over in the real world, where we use real products every day that for convenience, for advertising, for spam tracking, for a thousand reasons that make sense to us, we’re still within a reasonable risk or what the market has accepted as a risk.”

For more on the FBI’s stance on encryption and Going Dark, visit Security Management’s website for an exclusive interview with O’Connell.