Remote Cybersecurity Proves to Be Profitable

The year 2021 has proved to be a huge learning curve for the American workforce and the workforce across the world as the global pandemic of Covid-19 forces offices to shut their doors and move their remaining employees to remote-based. While the majority of the employees who were not furloughed or laid off all together suddenly became introduced to the concept of remote work, the concept itself is not new. In fact, the remote-work trend has been steadily picking up traction over the past couple of decades.

Among the industries that have come to embrace the remote-work trend before the Covid-19 forced everyone else to accept it, is the tech industry. And, rightfully so. Most tech companies are based in the San Francisco Bay area, and more specifically the Silicon Valley. While the Bay area itself is one of the most expensive areas to live in, Silicon Valley specifically tops the chart when it comes to the cost of living. Therefore, when tech companies want to attract the top tech talent to work through traditional means at an office, they have to pay salaries that are as high as 30% above the national average, in order to compensate for the extreme cost of living.

The tech industry’s welcoming embrace of the remote-work trend can perhaps best be seen through the ripple effect of Silicon Valley’s remote-based hiring. As more tech professionals are hired remotely, secondary tech hubs have been popping up in the country. Cities like Atlanta, Austin, Denver, Chicago, and Seattle have emerged as the next tech hotbeds.

In an industry once characterized by tech meccas like San Francisco and New York—cities with the highest cost of living in the US—the ability to hire remote tech professionals from areas with lower living expenses is welcomed by many. This allows Silicon Valley-based tech companies to hire top tech talent at a fraction of the overhead cost of hiring a local tech professional.

Additionally, the rise of coding bootcamps as a preferred means for budding tech professionals to learn the necessary coding skills to succeed in the tech industry has gone a long way in creating these secondary tech hubs, and consequently the rise of remote-based teams. In some cases, entire tech companies have gone completely remote-based, with offices serving more as mailing addresses and a way to offer remote employees an optional physical workplace if and when they desire.

If you find yourself scratching your head at the term “coding bootcamp” and wondering as to what such a program entails—simply put, coding bootcamps are short term, intensive programs that teach students all of the necessary coding skills to succeed in the tech industry, taking those who have never coded before to industry-ready professionals in less than a year.

With many schools like Kenzie Academy offering their bootcamps through online and self-paced means, many grads finish their bootcamp in as little as 10 to 24 weeks. Even better is that many of these programs also offer flexible tuition financing options like deferred tuition payments and Income Sharing Agreements (ISAs) which allow students to knock out their program and repay their very affordable—when compared to traditional education—tuition cost after they have landed their first job in the tech industry.

Let’s switch gears for a moment and take a look at one of the growing fields in the tech industry that has proved to be quite profitable on a remote-base both for the remote employees, as well as the hiring companies.

Cybersecurity

Remote-based cybersecurity teams build the security infrastructure that ensures the company’s private information and data—and more importantly, their customer’s information—are safe from any unauthorized access or malicious third-party cyber attacks.

Cybersecurity engineers code this security infrastructure in programming languages like Bash, C++, Python, and C. And once such infrastructure is built, it is up to the more entry-level cybersecurity analysts to monitor them for any potential red flags or suspicious activities.

Cybersecurity professionals also serve as what is referred to as “white hat” hackers, which is a form of ethical hacking used to break into their own infrastructure to expose any potential security weak spots.

Cybersecurity professionals can expect a national average starting salary of $50,000, with more senior engineers making over $130,000 per year.