For fields in which technology is heavily relied upon, a question that seems to be asked time and time again is “just how much is a human factor needed?”

For businesses, the difficulty with this concept is that the budget needed to sustain employees and keep up to date on software may be more than the business is willing or able to give. The cost of a human factor is a quite literal price of labor and training, which is needed, but to what extent is this needed if a computer could do a human’s job?

Of course there will always need to be human assistance with machinery, so simply focusing on solely technology could not work, as without training there will be human error, but with training a human could be more efficient than a machine. Or, that human could at least use the machine the more efficiently than the machine would operate alone.

To combat this, I believe that it would be necessary to allocate a good portion of the limited budget to training a team, with the other portion of the budget would go towards technological advancements to help the team and keep afloat in this world of ever advancing technology. In a perfect world, the budget would be more than enough to sustain both the employees of this sector and the technology required for it to function, however, if it was necessary I would prefer a smaller team of highly qualified, skilled, and experienced individuals over a larger team of less trained individuals.

Finally, I would recommend that those who are employing cybersecurity and information technology professionals educate themselves on the dangers involved with cybersecurity malfunctions, as if a budget was far too small for an adequate amount of training and technology there could be disastrous consequences for the business.