Needed: cybersecurity professionals.

• Position: CYBERSECURITY

The need for skilled cybersecurity specialists has grown exponentially as governments and businesses have raced to protect their networks from cyber attacks from all directions. Unfortunately, the supply doesn't begin to meet the demand, which some believe could become a national security issue.

"We do see a lack of capability and capacity in skilled professionals, and that's partly due to massive demand across the world that stretches an already small, existing pool of people," Bryce Boland, Asia Pacific chief technology officer at California-based Fire-Eye Inc., a cybersecurity firm, said in a recent Bloomberg Business-week interview.

Unfortunately, addressing this gap between supply and demand takes time. Rand Corp. explored the state of the cybersecurity labor market in its research report "Hackers Wanted: An Examination of the Cybersecurity Labor Market." It concluded that there has already been a large increase in education, particularly government-supported education, and an increase in the number of computer science majors in response to early indications of a growing demand for cybersecurity professionals.

"It's normal for the labor market to lag demand and education initiatives," Rand said in its report. "Theory suggests and experience confirms that the market may take a long time to respond to unexpected increases in demand. In the short term, many large organizations have found innovative ways of meeting the demand for cybersecurity professionals through internal recruitment and training."

The Rand report suggested the best steps may already have been taken for addressing the shortage. "The difficulty in finding qualified cybersecurity candidates is likely to solve itself, as the supply of cyber-professionals currently in the educational pipeline increases, and the market reaches a stable, long-run equilibrium," it concluded.

A new cybersecurity report released by the Pell Center at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island took the discussion...