You Don’t Need to Be a Cryptographer to Start Preparing for Post Quantum Security

As businesses, government institutions and other organizations accelerate digital adoption, the need for cybersecurity professionals continues to grow. At the same time, the skills required to protect increasingly complex environments are changing. Cloud security, threat intelligence, security operations, penetration testing and artificial intelligence are becoming part of the modern cybersecurity skill set. The gap between available talent and the capabilities organizations actually need is becoming harder to ignore. CYBERSECURITY NEEDS ARE CHANGING FASTER THAN SKILLS The global cybersecurity workforce is facing a skills shortage alongside its broader talent challenge. The 2025 ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study found that 95% of cybersecurity professionals surveyed reported at least one skills need within their teams, while 59% described those needs as critical or significant. The study also found that 88% had experienced at least one significant cybersecurity consequence because of skills shortages. For Indonesia, the implication is clear: building a cybersecurity team isn't simply about filling vacancies. Organizations need professionals who can apply their knowledge to real security problems. The skills required are also changing rapidly. The World

For cybersecurity teams, AI is quickly moving from something experimental to something people actually use. The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 found that 77% of surveyed organizations had adopted AI for cybersecurity. It is already being used for tasks such as phishing detection, intrusion response and user-behaviour analysis. That sounds like good news for teams struggling with workload. And mostly, it is. But AI doesn’t remove the need for skilled cybersecurity professionals. It changes what those professionals need to be good at. AUTOMATION CAN DO MORE. SO HUMANS HAVE TO DO MORE TOO. The same WEF research found that 54% of organizations considered insufficient knowledge or skills a barrier to using AI effectively in cybersecurity. Another 41% pointed to the need for human oversight. That second number matters. AI can analyse enormous amounts of information quickly. What it still struggles with is context: whether an unusual event is genuinely dangerous, how a technical issue affects the business and what action makes sense when the available information is incomplete. Cybersecurity professionals increasingly need

Most people understand authentication as a familiar sequence. Enter credentials, prove who you are and access the application. Modern systems keep working long after that login screen disappears. Applications use identity and access tokens to determine what users and workloads are allowed to do. Tokens support capabilities such as single sign-on, federation and API access. NIST describes them as a central part of access management infrastructure and zero trust architectures. On 15 September, NIST finalized IR 8587 with CISA involvement, providing implementation guidance for protecting tokens and assertions from forgery, theft and misuse. The publication covers identity providers, authorization servers, cryptographic key protection, token verification and lifecycle controls. For cybersecurity teams, there’s a workforce implication hiding inside that architecture. IDENTITY SECURITY HAS BECOME AN ENGINEERING SKILL IAM can sound administrative: create accounts, assign permissions, remove access when someone leaves. Those responsibilities remain. Cloud applications, APIs and machine identities have added another technical layer. Security professionals increasingly need to understand: * How tokens are issued, validated, renewed and revoked * How SSO and federation