Are companies finally realizing that they need to invest in “guardrails” for the information highway, aka the data-driven economy? And will this labor-intensive effort help create more mid-level jobs?
The Sony hack has forced the company to withdraw its newest film from the market, as well as causing the release of countless numbers of damaging and/or embarrassing documents. While not a death blow to Sony, the hack is certainly deeply wounding.
This event followed in the wake of the high-profile cyberattack on J.P. Morgan Chase, and other well-reported cybercrimes and data breaches affecting companies such as Home Depot and Target.
In response, companies are beefing up their cybersecurity funding and staffs. Jamie Dimon announced that Chase would be doubling its spending on cybersecurity, while Wells Fargo has increased cybersecurity staff by 50%.
Now, cybersecurity tends to be labor intensive, because it requires supervising the activities of all the workers in the company, while dealing with novel incursions from cybercrooks and hostile national states. As a result, all this cybersecurity is leading to increased jobs for information security and data security specialists. Right now Indeed.com is reporting almost 20,000 want ads nationally for information and data security specialists, out of which almost 5000, or 25%, are in the Washington DC area (this estimate is based on a keyword list of cybersecurity-related search terms that I developed). New York and Silicon Valley still lag behind in their demand for information security specialists, at least according to the want ad data.
While top level information security analysts are extremely well paid, many are mid-level jobs. They require a mixture of security skills with some tech savvy, and they pay on average roughly $90K per year.
But there’s a broader point here that goes beyond information security. Think of the data-driven economy like a winding highway, with mountains on one side and a sharp drop to a rocky shore on the other (visualize the Pacific Coast Highway north of San Francisco, if you want). The highway is scenic and fun to drive. On the other hand, it’s expensive to build guardrails, fill potholes, and keep the highway well-maintained. But without those expenditures, you get high profile accidents.
Companies like Sony and Home Depot. have been so busy trying to keep up with the data-driven economy that they haven’t invested enough in the less glamorous tasks of building guardrails and filling potholes. But as more big disasters happen, that way of thinking will change.
As companies build guardrails–boosting spending on cybersecurity, beefing up customer support, keeping mainframe, desktop , and mobile software up-to-date–they will inevitably have to hire more workers. That’s why the number of people working in computer-related occupations continues to rise.
The Internet ecosystem is being expanded to include less-glamorous but essential labor-intensive tasks such as cybersecurity. And as that happens, more jobs are being created.
