Kilkenny-based Business IT Solutions (BITS) has announced plans to double its workforce, creating 20 new high value roles in a range of IT professions to meet a surge in demand for cybersecurity across the region.
The new roles will be created over the next three years through a combination of recruitment and company acquisition according to Gavin Dixon who, with the expansion, moves into the role of BITS’ CEO, with Paul Byrne taking over as Managing Director of the growing company.
“We will be creating 20 new roles over the next three years to meet the massive growth in demand for cybersecurity services in the broader Kilkenny area, from project engineers and helpdesk analysts to security specialists and a range of support functions. This will bring us from our current 20 employees to around 40 staff in total”, Gavin said. “We’re currently in talks to acquire an IT company in the greater Dublin region, which will help us to meet demand amongst our Dublin-based clients.”
Gavin said the expansion plans are partially prompted by a need to address the challenges faced by companies moving to a hybrid working arrangement:
“As remote working becomes less of a temporary fixture and more of a permanent measure post-Covid, we are experiencing spiralling demand for cloud and security services, particularly in the financial and professional services sectors. This new hybrid arrangement brings all sorts of challenges to companies, who need to adapt their security protocols in order to safely accommodate the change.
“During the early days of the pandemic, in March 2020, so many of our clients moved to remote working overnight and we had to react instantly, creating that secure remote working environment for their teams by implementing a ‘work from home’ strategy for businesses who had never done so before. Now that many workers are moving back into the office and quite a few are embracing a hybrid work arrangement going forward, their security situation has to be reviewed.
“On the one hand, you have people going back into offices and starting up PCs that literally haven’t been used in 19 months, so their overall technology requirements need to be urgently reviewed. And, on the other, more and more employers are changing over to laptops-only to support flexible working arrangements which, again, has implications for data breaches and cyber-attacks.
“The increase in phishing emails we saw during the pandemic continues and it is so important that companies have in place a clear policy for their staff around how to identify these emails, how to respond and who to report them to.”
