A senior threat security expert said that the Philippines does not lack in cybersecurity professionals, rather the current talent pool does not align with the demand for cybersecurity services catering to small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Ryan Flores, the Senior Threat Researcher for Forward Looking Threat Research at Trend Micro, offered a different perspective that the country is not “significantly” behind other Southeast Asian countries when it comes to cybersecurity professionals.
In 2023, the Department of Information and Communication Technology (DICT) Secretary Ivan John Uy reported that Singapore has 2,000 cybersecurity workers, while 80% of the Philippines’ 200 cybersecurity professionals are working abroad.
Aside from that, the DICT chief said in early 2024 that there are 2 million job openings for cybersecurity professionals.
Flores, however, told PhilSTAR Tech that it was not the case, and the real problem lies with the low number of affordable cybersecurity services geared toward the needs of smaller businesses in the Philippines.
“Most of the companies, their services or their business models are more targetted towards big enterprises,” he said.
The threat security researcher cited security companies in Europe that are focused more on providing services to a certain region or country.
“I think we should have some of that here also to cater Philippine market and SMEs that cannot afford the services of very big companies.”
Moreover, he also advised SMEs to “skip” a generation of technology, if they are going to adopt AI-powered cybersecurity solutions as their cybersecurity defense.
Flores understood the reality that there a lot of industries that are still deep into technological debt. He cited the energy sector as one of those industries because they own power generation facilities.
These businesses could not just stop and replace their machines for it will surely incur downtime, which will roll into a bigger problem for a larger part of the country.
However, Flores urged SMEs to “modernize fully” if they want to employ new technologies, and refuse to do “patchwork.”
“If you skip a generation, you modernize your systems, you’re in the latest technology, and you can implement all of the other security mechanisms and integrations available,” he said.
Flores has more than 20 years in his career in the cybersecurity field. He has held the anti-virus engineer and incident response team manager at Trend Micro before becoming its APAC Forward Looking Threat Research team senior manager.
Trend Micro is a American-Japanese global cybersecurity firm founded in 1988 that produces threat reports, cybersecurity predictions, and hosts DECODE PH, an annual cybersecurity conference. The conference is in its eighth-year installation, which happened yesterday, Sept. 10, at the Shangri-La Hotel in Mandaluyong, Metro Manila.
