Critical Cybersecurity threats in India prompt CompTIA to launch new training collaborations

With India’s cybersecurity market set to grow at an astounding rate of 19% every year from 2018 to 2023, global IT certifications leader, CompTIA has entered into commercial training partnerships with four of the most dominant entities in the IT skills training space. These entities are: Springpeople and Suchi Managed Services, for a pan India audience, Infosectrain, for Delhi, Pune, Bangalore and Chennai and Cybersecurityindia for Mumbai, Pune and Thane only. With this new collaboration, CompTIA aims to strengthen the presence of its IT skills portfolio and make its certifications more accessible to learners both in metro cities as well as in tier 2 and 3 cities.

Rapid adoption of Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud & IoT (SMACT) technologies are resulting in growing complexities pertaining to data security, network infrastructure, and security regulation & compliance, thereby boosting demand for cybersecurity solutions and services across the country.

Demand for cybersecurity professionals is driven mostly by consulting firms, banks, the government, retail, BFSI companies and IT companies. Financial service institutions including banks, payment gateways and ecommerce organisations are the biggest employers in cybersecurity

This demand for cybersecurity professionals covers both leadership and lower levels. Demand has shot up in the last one year. The average salary for a cybersecurity head ranges anything between 2 cr to 4 cr annually. Companies are even paying up to Rs 10 lacs per annum to fresher’s who have the right skills. However there’s still a persistent skill shortage in this area. The dearth of skilled cybersecurity professionals continues to be a major problem for many organizations. Even with average InfoSec salaries soaring, there are thousands of vacant positions. Recruiters have complained that engineering graduates trained conventionally lack the skills cyber security companies are looking for. In this context, CompTIA’s globally recognized and state-of-the-art courses could play a huge role in bridging the skill-education gap. Students can leverage the reach of CompTIA authorized training partners spread across India to upgrade their professional and vocational resumes with the world’s leading vendor-neutral technical credentials, particularly in the evolving field of cyber security

The courses for which training will be imparted by these partners are CompTIA Security +, CompTIA CYSA + and CASP, CompTIA Pentest +, CompTIA Cloud + and CompTIA Network +.These well known industry standard certifications promise global recognition and a chance to sizzle up resumes for both working professionals and engineering students. While Springpeople and Infosectrain cater to those already in the workforce and looking to gain that extra edge in promotions or appraisals, Cybersecurityindia and Suchi Managed Services deliver learning modules for engineering students as well. CompTIA itself places no bar on pre-requisites for its certifications.

“We have focused on cybersecurity because it is one of the biggest imperatives of the today. It is estimated that in the near future, people would be connected to hundreds of billions of smart gadgets and devices. Consider what happens when you lose your phone. You are deprived of your contacts, account numbers and GPS to determine your location. Business organizations could lose significant amounts of data and money in terms of personnel required to collect and analyze them, strategic calculations, intellectual property, financial information that could be used to siphon off millions of rupees and so on. These points of interface add to our dependence and vulnerability. Because human ingenuity is continuously evolving, so are the ways in which sensitive data can be accessed and misused. That is why businesses will have to invest considerably in security risk management and mitigation systems as well as trained professionals”, says Pradipto Chakrabarty, Regional Director, CompTIA India.

“Cyber security is one field where there is going to be exponential growth. This is because cyber threats are evolving. They need to be guarded against constantly by experts. That is why cyber security is an indispensable part of any company’s strategy. We are excited to partner with CompTIA, the leading provider of skills certification worldwide”, said V P Prabhakaran, the CEO of Infosec Train.

“There is considerable shortage of both manpower and requisite skills needed to successfully implement a network security plan. There are several other aspects that we emphasize on to make cybersecurity training as complete as possible”, says Mrinal Bagaria , Head - Business Continuity , Spring people

“With our solid clientele, experience and innovative teaching methodologies, we are in the best position to help the nation bridge the wide gap between supply and demand for IT security professionals” said, Sanjit Mishra , CEO & Founder , Cybersecurity India.

Parvez Navroz, Suchi MS remarked, “CompTIA’s courses are comprehensive, relevant and practice based. We feel that we can make a huge contribution to skilling India’s growing young workforce”.

Experts also point out to the fact that the internet is a largely unregulated domain. This means that anyone is free to carry out any activity without the fear of being censored or punished. Further, because of the inter-governmental technicalities involved, dissemination of information and suspicious code is not completely prohibited. That means that risks could be incurred as soon as you put information online. For company websites spread across cities or even countries, remaining online is necessary to establish daily communication. The advent of cloud computing and storage, fintech services, mobile app usage, the internet of things, blockchain technology and online platforms for interacting with clients and businesses has implied that companies are now attempting to pre-empt threats before they arise, requiring constant monitoring and pro-active penetration testing of firewalls and encryption systems. All these capabilities require equipment and human resources.

Increasing investment by the government and financial institutions in a digital economy is also a key driver of hiring in the cyber security skills market. Expenditure on information security alone is set to increase to $ 1.7 billion within India in 2018, according to research firm, Gartner.