• Demand for IS Professionals
• Opportunity for the Indian IT Industry
• Addressing the Demand Gap

Information Security (IS) is one of the fastest growing segments of the Information Technology (IT) market. JobsAhead and Nasscom have recently concluded a research to estimate the demand of IS professionals in India and Worldwide, with a view to understanding the opportunities that may be available for the Indian IT industry.

Demand for IS Professionals
As per IDC, the worldwide demand for IS Services was approximately $8 billion in 2001, estimated to grow to $23.6 billion by 2006.Correspondingly,there is a growing demand for IS professionals - this research pegs the current demand for IS professionals at over 18,000 in India and over 60,000 worldwide. This is estimated to grow to over 77,000 in India and 188,000 worldwide by 2008. Thus, IS demand, which today accounts for about 3% of overall IT workforce demand, will rise to around 5-6% by 2008.

Some signs of this impending demand are already visible over past 24 months. On a sample of over 50,000 IT jobs advertised on JobsAhead, the percentage of jobs relating to IS security has risen from 1% to 2.3% over the past year. Compounded on high growth rate of IT itself, this represents a global opportunity for Indian IT firms

Need for IS Skills in other roles
While the demand estimates presented above focus on specialized IS professionals, it is important to note that there are other roles in IT industry, which require professionals with high level of IS knowledge. The most significant of these are:

• System and Network administrators - representing professionals involved in day-to-day administration of thousands of corporate systems and networks.
• Systems and Software Development - representing professionals involved in design and development of computer systems and software.

For example, in the US, it is recognized that a large number of the fresh 1.3 million IT workforce required, would need to have IS skills. Similarly, with the importance of export-led Software development in the Indian IT context, there is a need to ensure availability of IS skills in this sector.

A study conducted on jobs advertised on JobsAhead over past 12 months indicates that the demand of such professionals is about 3 times the demand of specialized IS professionals. Thus the overall demand for IS skills could be well over 600,000 worldwide by 2008.

Shortage of IS Professionals
Unfortunately, the high growth in demand of IS skills is not matched by a corresponding increase in availability of trained IS professionals. In United States alone, there is an expected shortfall of about 25000-50000 IS professionals over next few years. Based on skills data available at JobsAhead, which covers over 70% of the overall Indian IT professionals, it is estimated that in India, less than 2,500 professionals have specific IS skills, which represents a miniscule 0.5% of the IT workforce. Less than 10,000 professionals have a working knowledge of IS. At this rate, by 2008, we expect a shortfall of over 100,000 IS professionals globally.

Similarly, there is expected to be an even greater shortfall of professionals who require at least a basic understanding of IS, primarily in Network Administration and Systems Development roles.

Opportunity for the Indian IT Industry
The worldwide shortage of IS professionals presents an opportunity for the Indian IT Industry, in terms of addressing a growing proportion of IS needs worldwide. The critical enablers to address this opportunity are:

• Availability of IS talent in India - this is likely to be the largest limiting factor in how substantially India can leverage of this global opportunity. We recommend certain steps to address this issue below.
• Addressing the strategic concerns - that countries might have in engaging foreign manpower for such work especially concerns relating to national security. This needs to be addressed through partnerships at a national level.

Addressing the Demand Gap
As mentioned above, IS skills are required not only in specialized roles, but also in other professionals. Further, the estimated shortage of these skills is high. These factors warrant that development of IS skills be addressed at the base level of IT education, i.e. across the engineering colleges in the country. This will ensure that a significant number of IT professionals will have basic knowledge of IS.

Following the footprints of some of the early movers elsewhere, it is essential that basic as well as specialized IS training is imparted at a national scale in IT education curricula. The topics covered in such a course should include the following:

• Cryptography
• AAA framework
• Software safety and reliability
• Network security
• Secure operating systems
• Application security
• Design of Security policies
• Disaster recovery
• Biometrics
• Security auditing