Search

Niral is a Director of Business Intelligence with Focal Point’s Operations and Shared Services teams and brings many years of experience in business intelligence within cybersecurity and other industries.

David is a Director with Focal Point’s Integrated Risk Management practice and brings over 20 years of experience with audit, risk management, internal control frameworks, strategic governance, and financial and operational processes within both industry and professional services roles.

Less than 30% of organizations have formal workforce development plans in place for their IT and security staff, according to Gartner. With training consistently ranking among the most requested benefits by employees, especially those of younger generations, the lack of commitment to workforce development is particularly surprising. This problem, of course, is not unique to cybersecurity. But because of the staggering lack of skilled, experienced cybersecurity job seekers, the failure to effectively train those already in the field has a more serious impact. A failure to train cybersecurity professionals can result in a failure to protect an organization and its critical data. Fortunately, the industry appears to be changing course. Roughly half of security organizations plan to increase their budgets for cybersecurity training in 2020. If you’re in this group (and we hope you are), there are four important pitfalls to avoid as you transition from traditional training models to a high-performing workforce development program:

Focal Point Academy expands its Columbia, Md., campus with additional space, state-of-the-art technologies, and improved hospitality options.

Today’s businesses must be constantly evolving to meet changing business models, new regulatory requirements, technology innovations, and an increase in cyberattacks. To help businesses meet these new challenges, internal audit (IA) functions must evolve as well. While internal audit is not the sole owner of risk within an organization, it provides unbiased insight into an organization’s internal controls, corporate governance, and business processes. IA educates board members and executives on the business risks and their impact, helping detect and address issues before they are identified by external audit. As data and technology permeate every aspect of the modern organization, IA departments can no longer work alone. IA teams must expand their skillsets and work alongside other departments to more effectively reduce risk, improve controls, and identify inefficiencies within the organization. While 2019 has already brought significant changes to the audit industry, 2020 provides the opportunity for even more. Here are the top 10 trends we expect to see for the internal audit world in 2020:

It’s prediction season! In 2019, we discussed cyber workforce development with hundreds of security leaders, including many CISOs from Fortune 500 companies in the technology, retail, financial services, and healthcare space, as well as top cybersecurity workforce experts in the U.S. government and military. As a result, we have the opportunity to place our fingers directly on the pulse of the top trends shaping the cybersecurity workforce. Some of these are a steady incline of 2019 trends, while others – like skills assessments and federal government hiring increases – are unique to 2020. Let’s dive in.

Focal Point today announced the addition of Gary McIntyre as a Managing Director of Cyber Defense services. McIntyre is one of the industry's foremost experts in the development of Security Operations Centers (SOC).

Melissa is a Director in Focal Point’s Cyber Risk Advisory Practice with extensive experience in information security and healthcare regulatory…

Andrew Tremblay is a Director with Focal Point’s Internal Audit practice and has over 15 years of experience performing internal…