Technology can detect, alert, and respond. But that has never been the whole answer.
It is people who make the decisions that determine whether an organization is ultimately resilient or exposed and Europe does not have enough of them. The continent is short approximately 300,000 cybersecurity professionals. Globally, the gap stands at 4.8 million, with demand growing eight times faster than the workforce.
These are not projections. They are the numbers we are working with today, and they are precisely why conversations like the one that took place in Nicosia last Friday matter.
On 5 June 2026, Sphynx participated in “Skills for Digital Autonomy: Empowering a Resilient Society“, a high-level European conference held under the auspices of the Cyprus Presidency of the Council of the EU 2026 and the President of the Republic of Cyprus. Organized by European University Cyprus and the CYBER.EUC Research Center, the event brought together senior policymakers, ENISA, the European Commission, academia, and industry from across Europe all grappling with the same question: do we actually have the human layer that digital resilience demands?
At Sphynx, our participation is directly related to the importance we place on training in cybersecurity. How we build and evolve our offering is shaped by our active involvement in European research and innovation projects – and at the core of that work is the Sphynx Cyber Range. Cyber ranges represent one of the most significant innovations in how cybersecurity training is delivered today: through realistic simulations, emulation of real attack environments, and hands-on scenarios that go far beyond traditional classroom or e-learning formats.
At Sphynx, we invest continuously in developing and evolving our Cyber Range through multiple research programmes because we believe that effective training must be grounded in operational realism, not theory. Four of the EU projects we are currently active in sit directly at the intersection of this conviction and Europe’s skills agenda.
CYBERUNITY is building a federated, interoperable network of cyber range infrastructures across sectors and borders. The premise is simple: training without realism is theory. CYBERUNITY enables organizations to train against real-world, cross-domain attack scenarios — the kind that do not respect organizational perimeters or national boundaries. This directly informs how we design and evolve the Sphynx Cyber Range.
EU-INSPIRE addresses the cybersecurity talent gap not through short-term fixes, but through accredited, industry-aligned postgraduate education. The project offers three fully EU-funded master’s programmes — covering the technical and governance dimensions of cybersecurity, research and innovation, and the strategic and regulatory aspects including cyber insurance — alongside stackable micro-credentials designed for professionals already in the workforce. The goal is competency that translates directly into operational readiness. This is the kind of structured, long-term investment in human capital that Europe’s skills agenda has been calling for.
SecAwarenessTruss takes a targeted approach to one of the most underserved areas in cybersecurity training: critical infrastructure. The project delivers dynamic, cyber-range-based training programs for organizations across four of Europe’s most exposed sectors — and validates them through four concrete pilot deployments: telecoms (OTE), energy (PPC), healthcare (PAGNI, the largest hospital facility in Crete), and maritime (DSA). Each pilot is designed around the specific threat environment, infrastructure, and training needs of that sector — from ransomware and DDoS scenarios in telecoms, to medical device security and phishing simulations in healthcare, to navigation system spoofing in maritime. This is not research conducted in isolation. It is skills-building tested against the operational realities these sectors face every day.
SYNAPSE delivers an integrated cybersecurity risk and resilience management platform built around three pillars: situational awareness, incident response, and preparedness. But the measure of its ambition is not the platform itself it is the three concrete pilots through which it is being validated: one in energy storage and distribution, one in the supply chain of a public healthcare system, and one focused on cybersecurity insurance.
For Sphynx, SYNAPSE sits at exactly the intersection of skills and operational security: it ensures that the organizations responsible for essential services are not just equipped with the right technology, but with the organizational readiness to deploy it effectively when it matters most.
Together, these projects reflect a conviction we hold at Sphynx: that the future of European cybersecurity will be determined not by the sophistication of our tools, but by the depth of our human capabilities.
The conversation in Nicosia reinforced that belief. And it reminded us why continuing to invest in it through research, through training, through European collaboration.
→ Learn more about Sphynx’s cybersecurity training services
→ Explore all active R&D projects at Sphynx
