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Indonesia’s Cybersecurity Talent Problem Is Becoming a Skills Problem
Hiring more people helps. But if they freeze when the alert turns real, the headcount doesn’t mean much.
ITSEC Asia
Indonesia needs more cybersecurity professionals. That part is obvious. What is becoming less obvious is whether the real problem is still about numbers.
The 2026 SANS | GIAC Cybersecurity Workforce Research Report found that 60% of surveyed organizations said their teams lacked the right skills to defend against current threats. More concerning, 27% reported breaches directly linked to capability gaps.
That changes the conversation. A company can have a security team, a dashboard full of alerts and a stack of expensive tools. The harder question is whether the people behind them know what to do when something unusual happens.
Cybersecurity Work Is Moving Fast
Artificial intelligence is making that question harder.
AI can already help with alert analysis, vulnerability prioritization and repetitive investigation tasks. Attackers can use the same technology to make attacks faster and easier to scale.
In August 2026, Vice Minister of Communication and Digital Affairs Nezar Patria warned that agentic AI could allow cyberattacks to operate with less direct human involvement. He also highlighted threats such as harvest now, decrypt later, where encrypted information stolen today could potentially be decrypted using more advanced computing in the future.
That means knowing how to operate a security tool is becoming the baseline, not the finish line.
Security teams increasingly need people who can:
- Investigate unusual activity and decide what actually matters
- Understand attacker behavior instead of trusting every automated alert
- Work across cloud, endpoint, identity and network environments
- Use AI-assisted tools without blindly accepting their output
- Make decisions when an incident doesn’t follow the textbook
The uncomfortable part is that these skills are difficult to build from slides and theory alone.
AI Is Also Changing How Juniors Learn
Junior cybersecurity professionals have traditionally learned by doing repetitive operational work: reviewing alerts, investigating simpler cases and documenting incidents.
That work may not be glamorous, but it builds judgment.
SANS notes that AI is beginning to automate some of the same entry-level tasks that have historically helped train new cybersecurity professionals. If that trend continues, junior talent may get fewer chances to learn through routine work before they are expected to handle harder problems.
So training has to compensate.
Cyber ranges, simulations and scenario-based exercises can give people something a slide deck cannot: the experience of making a decision when the situation is messy and the answer is not immediately obvious.
Indonesia Needs More Talent. It Also Needs More Ready Talent.
Komdigi estimates that Indonesia will need around nine million digital talents by 2030, while the current supply stands at roughly three million.
Closing that gap matters. But counting course graduates or certifications alone will not tell us whether the workforce is ready.
A stronger measure is capability.
Can someone investigate an alert? Can they recognize suspicious behavior? Can they explain what happened? Can they respond without waiting for someone else to tell them what to do?
This is the gap that ITSEC Cyber & AI Academy is designed to address, combining cybersecurity learning with practical exercises, realistic scenarios and experience drawn from ITSEC Asia’s security operations.
As AI takes over more routine work, human judgment becomes more valuable, not less.
Indonesia needs more cybersecurity talent.
The next challenge is making sure that talent can actually do the job.
Explore practical cybersecurity and AI training at ITSEC Cyber & AI Academy: www.itsec.academy
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