Singapore’s cyber jobs market among world’s best
Yesterday, Singapore ordered blogger Alex Tan to correct his post on the States Times Review Facebook page that made accusations of the arrest of a supposed whistleblower and election rigging. — Reuters pic. Sketched by the Pan Pacific Agency.
SINGAPORE, Aug 9, 2021, Channel Asia. Looking for a plum cyber security gig? Singapore’s not a bad place to start, with the city-state being ranked second in a global tally of the best places to live for a cyber security job, Channel Asia reported.
Compiled by U.K.-based company Techshielder, which specialises in providing advice to businesses on internet security and privacy, the global rankings see the United States capital, Washington D.C. take the top position as the best city to live for a cyber security job.
Washington D.C. came first largely due to its high average salary, calculated at £84,628 by Techshielder, compared to its cost of living, along with strong job availability for cyber security professionals. Singapore, coming in second overall, actually scored better than Washington D.C. on Techshielder’s job availability index, but lower on average salary and cost of living scores.
“Singapore comes in second place,” Techshielder said in an online post. “Known for its cultural sights like the Marina Bay Sands and the Singapore flyer, this [Southeast Asian] city has the highest job availability out of all the cities examined.
“However, the average salary of £55,577 and the high cost of living at an average of £3,267 brings it down,” it added.
By contrast, Techshielder’s home city, London, came much further down the list, losing points because of its lower average salary compared to other cities paired with the high cost of living.
Following Singapore on the list was Germany, in third place. Other cities or regions in the top 10 included Luxembourg; Brussels, Belgium; Ottawa, Canada; Vienna, Austria; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and Tokyo, Japan. Looking just at cyber security job availability, Singapore came first, followed by Washington D.C. and London.
“Recent graduates and any job seekers looking for a new role can increase their chances of getting hired by looking for cities with the largest number of job openings,” Techshielder said. “We analysed the amount of cyber security related jobs available on Indeed and Glassdoor to reveal the cities with the most cyber security jobs,” it added.
The company also ranked the top 10 countries globally with highest number of remote cyber security jobs, with the Philippines landing in eighth place, the only Southeast Asian country to appear in the tally.
Perhaps of most interest to cyber security professionals, the most in-demand skills to learn in 2021, according to Techshielder’s research, was network security, followed by threat intelligence, compliance, cloud and security information and event management (SIEM), respectively.
As reported in March, cyber security spending soared globally by 10 per cent to hit US$53 billion in 2020, following a year of high-profile data breaches.
According to analyst firm Canalys, the segment outperformed all other IT segments except business continuity and workforce productivity, which took precedence during the pandemic.
The global tally comes as the Singapore government works to implement advanced technical solutions to further strengthen the city’s public sector data security posture.
In November 2020, for example, the government implemented the Government Commercial Cloud (GCC) Privileged Identity Management (PIM) solution.
“With more government systems migrating to the cloud as part of our ‘Cloud-First’ strategy, the GCC-PIM solution will ensure that access by privileged users (i.e. those whose roles require wide access to data), such as system administrators, will be secured and monitored to prevent unauthorised use of data,” Singapore’s Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO) said in a statement.
At the same time, the government has started to develop whole-of-government (WOG) data loss protection (DLP) services, which tap into technical and process controls to detect anomalous activities, such as unexpected downloads of large amounts of data to personal computers, that are indicators of possible malicious activity or data incidents.
The implementation of the WOG DLP services will commence by the end of 2021, SNDGO said. The local region has been rocked by a number of high profile data breaches resulting from cyber attacks this year.
In early March, Malaysia Airlines informed Enrich frequent flyer members of a “data security incident” via a third-party IT service provider, insisting the breach avoided the national carrier’s core IT infrastructure and systems.
Just days later, Singapore Airlines warned its own frequent flyer members of a third-party breach affecting up to 580,000 people.
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