Knowledge and Skills Needed to Craft Successful Cybersecurity Strategies

Abstract

Daily advancing technologies and next-generation networks are creating entirely different digital environments for people, organizations, and governments within the next several years. Because cybersecurity provision in such environments involves many actors and must overcome many evolving threats and challenges, strategies must be responsive and multi-pronged. Development and execution of sufficiently savvy strategies to face the complex problems in this context necessitate identification of all the actors and operations that affect, directly or indirectly, on the cybersecurity of the digital ecosystems. In this study, we seek to provoke thinking about how actors and stakeholders could get better at crafting successful cybersecurity strategies, and identify and integrate specific types of skills required to formulation these strategies taking into account where decisions are actually made. This work provides an insight into cybersecurity education, calibrating and differentiating knowledge and skills to make the right demands on the right actors who have the authority and responsiveness to introduce change from multiple entry points. This enables practitioners to adopt more hands-on approaches that can be helpful to improve transparency, accountability and collaboration across levels of a socio-technical system.