Eliminate Cyber Security Expert Burnout

Half of cybersecurity teams said they need up-to-date security systems (46%), while another 46% cited better IT security awareness training for end-users and employees.

While an onslaught of ransomware, payment fraud, corporate espionage, intellectual property theft, and disinformation campaigns have all increased at an alarming rate, the demand for cyber skills is more significant than ever and the shortage of workers with the required expertise has a negative domino effect on IT across the whole sector, with many professionals reaching their breaking point…“ (paraphrased)

How few of us saw burnout coming? 

Didn’t we assume – as in other fields – we’d just increase the cyber-security workforce and it would address the issue while creating a high number of well-paying jobs for the tech industry and its enthusiastic newcomers? That this wave of needed focus might even compete on the scale of a short-lived “Dot com“ era some of us will never forget? Well, it’s not that simple.

Those of us in the industry can understand, if we take time to recognize the problem, how valuable our seasoned, experienced cyber-career colleagues are and that they didn’t sprout skillsets overnight to enable them viewing cybercrime through a lens that empowers them – one they’ve earned!  Flying high one moment to rise above known cyber-tactics in order to discover hackers‘ newest angle, entry point, and mode of acquiring a firm’s assets … then diving deep into the dark web to uncover smoldering threats to a network breach by hackers‘ misuse and negative repurposing of A1 to undermine a network and its data-safeguards takes a trained, experienced mind to unravel. Even the specialists are appalled to see cyber abuse achieved by convoluting the very tools designed to detect it.

”Qualified“ is a loaded word in cybersecurity vernacular. A qualified cybersecurity partner may or may not qualify in the strictest sense as an MSSP yet they often choose to separate Managed Services from Managed Security Services with that designation because their performance provides the results an MSSP is known for. Likewise, a newly schooled cyber-security student with a couple years in the field is necessary and welcomed (next gen advanced ghost-busting of cyber-breach woes) but those certified newbies are not truly qualified until they’re prepared to face the realities of the chair they will occupy, especially if they haven’t had adequate mentoring.

In no arena nor at any time like the present has it been more critical for the mature, experienced workhorses and the eager, inexperienced, pioneering workforce to play well together. With a global landscape whose optimized IT is dependent upon and run by and through the world wide web and its digital capacities, we are enslaved by and beholden to safeguard its content, watch-guarding users in an attempt to ensure the positive elements which technology-via-web contributes to society. Of particular importance is that users’ wellbeing comprises the majority of web activity we engage in.  There are no absolute statistics that irrefutably document the internet to be a provider of more than less positive benefit to its users. What IS documented is the difficulty in monitoring and ensuring what is engaged in on the web, so that threats to personal security and assets are safeguarded and working more than less of the time.

Those sentinels we entrust with such a task – all those cybersecurity partners working for and with IT teams and MSPs, who own responsibility and liability for their part of cyber-securing the privacy, well-being, data and operations of those customers and partners, are not shy when articulating that they are hard pressed, mentally and physically, to keep up the pace and fill their role without consequences to the fast-moving, cyber-securing task at hand.

Three key takeaways to eradicate the cyber burnout threat:

To Cybersecurity Partner Firms

Your cyber-career specialists are irreplaceable. Tell them, treat them so, and pay them fairly.

To Owners and C-Suite Execs, All Firms:

Engage a qualified cybersecurity partner while they are available, can affordably provide you leveraging of their technology, cyber-expertise, and staff training, and document your cyber-insurance worthiness for anyone watching or asking.

To the Tech Industry Rainmakers:

Insist on Mentors within cyber-education. Engage the newcomers and ensure they are mentored by specialists who have honed their skills by averting breaches, seizure of data and operations, and ransoms.. Insist on Cyber Awareness Training of every company’s staff,  Statistics show a large percentage of breach is caused by staffs’ inadvertent online behavior. Gift your staff with the employee benefit of cyber-training and receive a human firewall in return! (Data-Guard 365 isn’t the only cyber-partner prioritizing this but they have created a relevant, personalized, documented cybersecurity awareness training program for every customer they cyber-secure.)

Let’s work smarter, together, to optimize our resources and our resolve to keep cyber-crime at bay. We can’t live without IT – the hardware, the software and processes, and the human assets that make it work! 

Data-Guard 365 is a MSSP firm headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, with offices in Chicago, Atlanta, and other strategic locations across the globe. The company is a one-of-a-kind business partner whose people, processes, and technology provide invincible cyber security for a price point that pays for itself.

www.data-guard365.com / (317) 967-6767 / info@data-guard365.com