Rising Above the Tech Scene

Canada is on the cusp of a Cyber-Renaissance and continues to rise above

There are plenty of Canadian success stories. Elon Musk went to school at Queen’s University in Ontario, and he’s one of the world’s great innovators. The Kitchener- Waterloo region is the Silicon Valley of the North, and home to cutting-edge technology research schools like the University of Waterloo, which is widely regarded as a leading technology school in Canada. Major tech players like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook routinely recruit students from this area.

Kitchener-Waterloo is also the birthplace of BlackBerry/ Research in Motion (RIM), OpenText, and CacheFlow, which grew into Blue Coat, which in turn merged with Symantec. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are also emerging hotbeds of entrepreneurship and startup incubators, with their governments bolstering innovation and investment in cybersecurity. These are examples of Canadian success stories.

Many schools in Canada now offer dedicated diplomas and certifications in cybersecurity. Students can enter two-, three-, or four-year programs in cybersecurity and graduate with useful and marketable skills. These programs have broadened the cyber talent pool from which big companies can recruit. In fact, some college kids are graduating at age twenty-one or twenty-two with degrees in cyber and fielding multiple job offers. That type of opportunity just didn’t exist a decade ago. Yet, there is still a massive skills shortage in cyber, a problem you’ll read about in Chapter 4 of Canadian Cybersecurity 2018

Canada has a track record of innovation, a proven and growing talent pool, and a culture of technological entrepreneurship. It’s one of the most wired and networked countries in the world. In fact, a higher percentage of homes in Canada have access to high-speed internet than in the United States, and Canada is fostering a cyber boom modelled after the tech boom in Israel. It is our sense that Canada is on the cusp of a Cyber-Renaissance. Many of the contributors you’ll meet when reading Canadian Cybersecurity 2018 are pioneers leading the way.

Download the CLX Forum book, Canadian Cybersecurity 2018: An Anthology of CIO/CISO Enterprise-Level Perspectives: http://www.clxforum.org/