As they bid to make home working safer, employers have spent so much on security that they have pushed up salaries of cyber security specialists.

Salaries for experienced cybersecurity professionals working in London within well-remunerated sectors such as finance services have seen salaries rise to almost £71,500, according to recruiter Randstad.

“A-player” cybersecurity experts in the East Midlands have seen their pay rise by over eight per cent in the last year, with salaries up from £60,800 to £66,100 – the biggest increase in average salaries in the UK.

Adrian Smith, senior director of operations at Randstad said: “Employees working from home during the lockdowns made the job of keeping organisations’ IT infrastructure intact much harder. More than half of decision makers in the IT community think remote workers will expose their organisation to the risk of a data breach.  Remote working on a vast scale has been a major headache for IT security and that’s driven recruitment – especially in London.”

In March, Lindy Cameron, the chief executive of the UK’s cyber-security agency, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), said cyber-security was “simply not embedded into the UK’s boardroom thinking”. But Randstad says higher pay demands reflects that employers are now taking cybersecurity seriously.

The need for cybersecurity experts has also increased as more businesses put more of their operational emphasis on the virtual world.

Adrian Smith said: “Bosses might have been trying to put hiring freezes in place over the last year but cyber-security was not a corner that CEOs could afford to cut. Salary rises reflect that companies appreciate that they can’t ignore cyber-security.”