Younger Cybersecurity Pros Believe Automation Coming for Their Jobs

Written by Edward Gately
November 13, 2020

Not everything in cybersecurity should be automated.

… super difficult. So that problem hasn’t gone away just now.

CF: What’s the latest data in terms of gender diversity among cybersecurity pros?

SH: We saw a big uptick in women this year, which is great, really good to see. It’s now 21% compared to 9% in 2019. So that’s a good jump.

But we did also see that, on average, wages were lower for women, with the exception of Singapore, which is interesting. We looked at five different countries and the United States was the worst as far as lack of parity on pay. I think organizations need to do something to address that. You should be paid the same for the same work. Equality is very, very important there. But … this new working-from-home environment brings opportunities for more, not just women, but I’d say predominantly more women to potentially be able to return to work when maybe they’ve left to have families and aren’t able to go physically to an office every day. You can be a bit more fluid with your time.

CF: Has Exabeam examined racial diversity and equity in cybersecurity?

SH: Looking forward, racial diversity is something I’d definitely be interested in looking at next year for sure. I think diversity comes in so many different formats. It’s not just about which bathroom to use. It can be everything from say racial diversity through to diversity of thought. There are many different ways of of thinking about diversity. We have some great programs ongoing and … we’re kind of digging into how do we support diversity within our organization and what does that mean.

But I think a lot of people, they definitely start with gender and move out to racial diversity. But you can go a lot further. It’s been proven over and over again that a more diverse workforce gives you so many different viewpoints and is actually so much better for business. I think it’s something that organizations do need to continue to look into and support diversity initiatives across the organization.

If you want to improve, move forward, find new things, new ways of doing things, diversity is so key to having that happen. Now, if you just have the same people with the same thought process and the same experiences, you can’t change. You can’t move forward.

CF: What are some of the things that Exabeam’s doing to increase diversity?

SH: We start with something on the gender side. We’ve got something called ExaGals. It came about very early in the life of the company. And it was something that came down from Exabeam CEO and co-founder Nir Polak. It was very clear that it was something that was important to him — and he’s a big proponent of supporting diversity. So ExaGals has been around for a long time in Exabeam years. And there’s a lot of activity that goes on there through virtual volunteering, knowledge sharing, mentoring, an awful lot of things happening on the ExaGals side.

More recently, we’ve started something called Community, which is focusing more on diversity on a wider scale. So it’s still in early days right now, but there’s teams being formed. We’re looking at data across the company. We’re looking at some ideas that we’ve got of how to share news around diversity to give people different ideas and viewpoints. In addition, unconscious bias training is something that’s come up. That’s one that I think is is very, very important.