If you have been thinking about a career change, or wondering which tech skill is actually worth investing in, three separate Irish news stories from the past month give you your answer.
Ireland has a cyber security problem. And it does not have enough trained people to fix it.
In June, RTÉ reported on The Hidden Cost of Cyber Risk, research from eir Business supported by Microsoft
The findings were stark. Cyberattacks are costing Irish SMEs up to €3.4 billion every year, and those businesses are losing more than 7.2 million working days annually to cyber incidents.
What is most striking is where the damage comes from. It is not the dramatic, headline-grabbing breach. It is the steady drip of everyday disruption — phishing emails, ransomware attempts, downtime, lost productivity. As eir Business Managing Director Susan Brady put it, for most SMEs it is “the cumulative impact of everyday incidents” that does the real harm.
Everyday incidents need everyday defenders. Not a handful of elite specialists, but thousands of trained people working across ordinary Irish businesses.
In July, the Irish Examiner reported that Ireland is being referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union for failing to implement the NIS2 cybersecurity directive — with the European Commission recommending financial sanctions.
NIS2 raises security standards across 18 critical sectors, including health, energy and transport, and introduces accountability at senior management level. Ireland’s National Cyber Security Bill, which will transpose the directive and place the National Cyber Security Centre on a statutory footing, is expected to be published in the autumn.
Read that as a hiring forecast. When cyber security becomes a legal duty with board-level accountability attached, organisations need people who understand controls, monitoring, incident reporting and compliance. That demand does not build slowly. It arrives on a deadline.
PwC Ireland’s recent analysis of the country’s cyber resilience makes the picture complete. Attackers are already using AI to automate reconnaissance, write convincing phishing messages and speed up malware development. Ireland’s profile during its EU Presidency only increases the attention it attracts.
But PwC is equally clear that the same technology strengthens defence — improving threat detection, supporting incident response and helping teams make sense of huge volumes of data. In the words of PwC Ireland’s Chief Technology Officer, David Lee, “resilience is becoming a defining characteristic of well-run organisations.”
The message for anyone considering this career is an encouraging one. Cyber security is not being automated away. It is being upgraded — and it needs people who understand both sides of the AI equation.
Put the three stories together and a rare alignment appears.
The demand is proven, not predicted. Irish businesses are already paying billions for a problem they would much rather prevent. The regulation is coming, and it will turn cyber security from a nice-to-have into a legal requirement.
To learn more you can find Business Technology Academy’s Cyber Security Course by clicking ‘Courses’ tab above
Business Technology Academy is a member of Aontas, the Irish National Adult Learning Organisation, Cyber Ireland, Ireland’s Cyber Security Industry Association and is accredited by the European Association for Higher Education
