Written by:
Anne Gotay Many organizations have moved toward cloud-first initiatives to stay competitive and manage operational needs. While this offers many advantages in collaboration, computational resources, and accelerated development, it has dramatically increased the attack surfaces. These cloud initiatives process regulated and sensitive data for organizations, making them tempting targets for attackers.
This has dramatically increased the demand for security teams to protect these technologies. Unfortunately, burnout and attrition have already damaged staff sizes making it even more challenging for existing staff to handle the existing workloads.
Managing these increased demands will take more than placing a help wanted ad to find new support. Instead, organizations may need to consider contractors and managed security service providers (MSSPs) to help bridge the gap. Learn how your organization can make the most of these options and how simplifying your solutions can help your organization improve efficiency and save money in securing your data.
Why Is Staffing Such a Problem?
Even before the pandemic, organizations were having difficulty maintaining existing overworked teams and burning out. While numerous individuals are coming out of schools with cybersecurity degrees, they lack the boots-on-the-ground experience to take the theoretical knowledge to apply it practically.
Burnout Is Real
The move toward cloud and remote work added a great deal of additional strain to teams already at capacity. This has led almost two-thirds of security professionals to consider leaving their current positions because of high stress. This is a non-trivial amount of the existing workforce that is overworked and looking to move on to other opportunities to reduce stress levels.
Part of this stress is attributable to the increased responsibility of managing sensitive data that has moved outside of the traditional security perimeter. The other portion of this stress is due to the solutions implemented to address these security needs. As a bandaid to make it through the pandemic, many businesses found point solutions that addressed targeted security needs rather than more holistic solutions that deliver long-term benefits. These point solutions require management and monitoring, which has added an immense workload to already taxed teams.
Shallow Talent Pool
This would not be nearly as much of a problem if it were easy to go out, post a job and replace those that leave with new talent. Unfortunately, the current state of its security has almost 700,000 recent graduates coming into the market, but a deficit of 2.7 million experienced security professionals. While the new graduates can eventually gain the skills and experience to take these roles, this process can take years, and the need for individuals with these skills is now.
Bridging the Gap
Even if organizations cannot fill the roles organically through hiring, the demand for new talent is not going away. Finding solutions to this problem may require looking at alternative labor sources to hold the organization over until the full-time staff can take over. By streamlining your operations, you will make it easier for external solutions to get up to speed in delivering protection and set the stage for keeping your employees happy long term.
Improving the Transition
Before even considering external solutions, it is crucial to mitigate the source of much of your existing security team’s frustrations. This means directly addressing the complicated point solutions and messy architecture, causing them to work harder every day. Finding multi-functional solutions that meet multiple needs and can integrate or replace existing solutions is crucial.
Service Solutions
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have long been a staple of the IT world for providing essential tech support and administration services for organizations. This service has expanded into security to become MSSPs. While MSPs handle tech support and general operations, MSSPs help meet organizational security needs from monitoring to deploying, configuring, and managing security services.
MSSPs, while an excellent temporary solution, are not a good long-term fix. These MSSPs come with many trade-offs that in-house security does not. MSSPs are a service, and they control their staffing, removing the business’s ability to choose who is protecting their data. With an MSSP, they are a service to multiple organizations, and your organization is not their only customer. Staff from your site might be moved to other places to deal with incidents or meet immediate security needs. Also, MSSP services work on service level agreements (SLAs) so additional requirements not in the original contract can lead to upcharges.
Temporary Help
Alternatively, if you wish to maintain control of your staff, you can look to staffing firms to provide short or long-term contractors to fill roles. These contractors have defined terms of service and can often be extended or, if they excel, hired permanently. However, this all comes at a price. Contractors are usually more expensive than permanent staff for their contact, and early termination of the contract to hire or replace them also comes with additional fees.
If your business may wish to hire them permanently, there is no guarantee that they will want to accept the offer. Even if they’re going to take the offer, there is often an additional cost to the staffing firm to close out the contract and compensate them for the loss.
The Right Solution To Ease Transitions
No matter how your organization finds ways to manage the information security skills gap, the need to simplify and optimize the cybersecurity technology stack is there. Sotero is a complete solution that delivers multiple capabilities to help your organization streamline and optimize data privacy and security.
Sotero allows you to cut costs by minimizing the existing sprawl of security products by allowing you to manage your data security ecosystem through a single-pane-of-glass. Intelligent automation guarantees that new assets and applications added to the security fabric inherit security capabilities, reducing the load on your staff and simplifying operational overhead.
Schedule a demo today to learn more about how the Sotero Data Security Platform can help you make the most of your existing IT security workforce.