Half of all UK businesses have a basic cyber security skills gap and are struggling to fill open job roles, according to a new government report.

Around a third of UK business have an advanced cyber security skills gap, a report from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has found.

There were 160,035 cyber security job postings in the past 12 months, an increase of 30 per cent compared to the previous year. Around 27 per cent of vacancies were reported as hard-to-fill compared with 44 per cent last year.

The DSIT report said there is an estimated shortfall of 11,200 people to meet the demand of the cyber workforce, down from 14,100 last year due to slower growth of the sector.

Around 17 per cent people working in the cyber sector are female, a decline of five per cent compared to last year, with around 14 per cent of senior roles in the industry filled by women.

The report follows the news that UK organisations pay an average of £3.4 million for data breach incidents.

Last month the UK government unveiled a new digital strategy, which includes tackling the digital skills gap.

The strategy is designed to bring together cross-government tech and digital policies into what the government describes as “one unified roadmap” for making sure digital tech drives economic growth in the UK.

It includes bringing tech leaders together in a new Digital Skills Council to tackle the skills gap and review the UK’s large-scale computer processing capabilities, needed to power technologies like AI.

The government also recently revealed that a record number of people had applied for its cyber skills training programme to start a new career in the cyber sector.

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