The cybersecurity workforce gap keeps making headlines...
May 6, 2025
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The cybersecurity workforce gap keeps making headlines. But what if the real issue isn’t just the number of people? What if it’s how we’re using them, and how much we’re draining the ones already in place?
Year after year, the default response to rising threats has been to “hire more staff.”And yes, bringing in more people can help when a team is genuinely understaffed. But in reality, many security professionals are already drowning in noise, starved of support, and stuck in systems that don’t give them a chance to succeed.
In this blog post, we’re revisiting the cybersecurity staffing crisis (yes, the one that’s been dissected endlessly).
But here’s the angle that could’ve been overlooked so far: what if the hiring problem isn’t just about scarcity, but about how traditional teams are structured in the first place?
This is a clear-eyed look at why current staffing models are breaking down, and how augmentation, including AI, could offer meaningful relief. Maybe the answer isn’t hiring more. Maybe it’s hiring smarter.
Traditionally, staff augmentation in cybersecurity means bringing in external talent like contractors, consultants, or specialists to support overwhelmed internal teams. It’s a way to scale quickly without long-term hiring.
But that definition is evolving. With AI entering the mix, augmentation no longer just means “more people.” It now includes intelligent systems that can support analysts, automate grunt work, and reduce alert fatigue.
AI is redefining what augmentation can mean for modern security teams. But before we get into solutions, let’s look at what’s breaking down.
The cybersecurity talent shortage has been discussed to death. What’s less discussed and far more urgent is what’s happening to the people already in the roles. This isn’t just a hiring problem, but a structural one. How security work is distributed, supported, and valued inside organizations is fundamentally flawed.
In addition to being under immense pressure, security professionals today are also running at a deficit. Between constant alert triage, incident escalations, shift work, and back-to-back context switching, there’s rarely time to think deeply, let alone breathe. The mental overhead is stressful, and it’s eroding cognitive sharpness and emotional bandwidth.
The real issue isn’t just how much work there is. It’s how relentless and fragmented it feels. There’s no buffer. There’s no decompression. Even high performers report cognitive fatigue and disengagement because the system doesn’t let them recover.
When something breaks, the security team is often the first to get blamed, even when they flagged the risk months ago. This culture of blame, where leadership leans on security post-incident rather than preemptively, creates a sense of futility. Add in fragmented ownership, unclear escalation paths, and political interference, and you get teams who stop raising concerns—not because they don’t see them, but because it feels like no one’s listening.
Security isn’t failing because it lacks visibility. It’s failing because it lacks authority.
Despite the increasing complexity of cyber threats, many security teams still find themselves excluded from key decisions. They’re looped in too late or brought in only to veto plans, never to help shape them. This has led to the persistent stereotype of security as “the department of no,” a reactive gatekeeper instead of a strategic collaborator.
It’s not a perception issue. It’s an access issue. Professionals can’t do high-value work if they’re left out of the room where those values are set.
In a surprising number of organizations, especially small and mid-sized ones, “the security team” is just one person. That person is responsible for everything: detection, response, tooling, vendor management, compliance, and training. There’s no backup, no second opinion, no division of responsibility. And even in larger orgs, it’s not uncommon for individual contributors to work in silos.
This isolation doesn’t just lead to burnout. It creates avoidable risks and uneven quality across the board.
Hiring more staff doesn’t automatically solve anything if the hires don’t match the threat landscape. In fact, 52% of organizations say the real issue isn’t having too few people, it’s having the wrong skill sets. Adding more junior analysts to handle cloud security gaps, for example, won’t work if none of them understand IAM risks or federated access models.
Teams need specific expertise, not general manpower. And that’s exactly what’s in short supply.
Security professionals are mission-driven by nature. They care about protecting people, systems, and reputations. But in heavily regulated or politically entangled environments, that purpose can get buried. Compliance checklists replace threat modeling. Metrics replace impact. Over time, the work feels hollow.
Eventually, people walk away because the work stops mattering.
Capability mismatch is the real blocker
52% of organizations say the bigger issue isn’t headcount—it’s not having the right skills on the team. (SANS | GIAC)
Cuts are hitting hard
37% of organizations slashed security budgets in 2024, and 25% laid off cybersecurity staff, while threats kept growing. (ISC2)
No time to learn, no time to grow
Over 50% of organizations say they can’t spare the time for upskilling, even though 90% report at least one critical skills gap. (ISC2)
Skills gaps lead to breaches
Organizations with skills gaps were nearly twice as likely to suffer a material breach last year. (ISC2)
Burnout, not laziness
39% cite “lack of time” and 36% cite “lack of budget” as the top reasons staff can’t access training, not a lack of will. (SANS | GIAC)
Only 14% feel confident in their current team’s capabilities
Two-thirds of organizations report moderate-to-critical skills gaps in their cyber workforce. (WEF)
For years, “staff augmentation” in cybersecurity has meant contracting outside help when the internal team is stretched thin. That usually looks like pulling in short-term engineers, incident response freelancers, or compliance specialists to plug temporary gaps.
But here’s the problem: most of those gaps aren’t temporary.
Teams aren’t falling behind because someone’s on PTO or a vendor audit snuck up on them. They’re falling behind because the baseline workload is too high. Because the threats don’t sleep, and the tools don’t integrate, and the org won’t invest in reducing cognitive drag. In that context, throwing in a contractor for three months is a patch, not a fix.
So what if we redefined what augmentation means?
This doesn’t mean replacing people. It means relieving them of the repetitive, noisy, mentally draining tasks that machines can do faster and more consistently. Think of it like this: instead of hiring someone to “help out,” what if you extended your team with always-available support that can handle the slog and flag the signal?
That’s what modern augmentation can look like with automation and AI. The goal isn’t to replace analysts, but to free them up to think like analysts again.
Some examples:
These aren’t buzzword bots. They’re tools built to reduce noise and surface what matters, so that people can do the kind of work they were hired to do in the first place.
With traditional managed SOCs, there’s another challenge. Contractors often support several different clients at once. They’re constantly shifting between environments, policies, and tooling setups. The work demands deep concentration, but the reality is chaotic. There’s little time to settle in, and even less mental space to track every nuance.
AI augmentation avoids that trap. These digital teammates are trained on your specific environment and retain that context over time. They don’t confuse workflows between clients. They don’t forget how your team handles escalation or which tool logs what. They learn once and stay locked in.
The value of smart augmentation isn’t raw capacity. It’s clarity. When you lift the daily load even slightly, something shifts: burnout eases, collaboration improves, people speak up more, less falls through the cracks. Suddenly, the team has space to patch things before they break. To mentor. To learn. To take a real lunch.
And yes, sometimes you still need headcount. But more often than not, the first step isn’t to hire. It’s to subtract the noise.
Let’s say you run a lean SOC. Your analysts are solid, but they’re buried in alerts. False positives, noise, duplicate tickets—the usual. The team is talented, but every day feels like a sprint, and important work keeps getting pushed aside because no one has the bandwidth to slow down and think.
Now imagine this: alongside your human team, you have an AI SOC Operations Specialist. Not just a backend engine, but a visible, embodied avatar—purpose-built for triage.
It reviews incoming alerts across multiple tools, correlates events, suppresses known false positives, and escalates only what’s truly suspicious. It knows your environment because it was trained on it. It understands your runbooks and escalation paths. It can flag misconfigurations, spot repeat offenders, and even nudge junior analysts when they miss a step.
And it works 24/7. It doesn’t lose context. It doesn’t get tired, hungover, or distracted. It doesn't quit mid-shift. It just keeps showing up with consistency, speed, and no ego.
That kind of support isn’t hypothetical. We’ve already built these smart teammates for you - specialists in SOC operations, threat intelligence, compliance, and more.
And they’re not meant to replace anyone. They’re built to give your security team something they haven’t had in a long time: margin.
When your security team has help that never burns out, you start to see the difference. Analysts can focus on the high-signal cases. Tier 1 tickets stop piling up. And instead of always reacting, the team can start getting ahead.
It’s not about making humans obsolete. It’s about giving them back the space to think clearly and do the work they were hired for.
A shift is already underway.
According to the 2024 SANS AI Survey, nearly half of organizations using AI in their cybersecurity programs have reported better job satisfaction among their teams. The reasons aren’t surprising. AI is automating the grind. Tasks that used to sap energy are getting delegated to systems that don’t mind repetition.
71% of those teams said satisfaction improved because AI took over the tedious parts of the job. Another 61% said they felt a greater sense of accomplishment. Work-life balance improved for nearly half of the respondents.
This isn’t about making work easier just for the sake of it. It’s about making it more sustainable. When people spend less time stuck in repetitive flows, they have more space to do the things that matter—investigating threats, mentoring junior analysts, building tools, even thinking ahead instead of always reacting.
And the change is happening fast. Over 40% of organizations are already using AI in their security programs, and 66% of those are deploying it directly in their SOCs. It’s already part of the job, and it’s improving workflows.
So what makes AI augmentation work in this context? What makes it useful, not disruptive?
Support tools only help when they understand what they’re walking into. The best AI augmentation isn’t generic. It’s trained on your specific environment—your alert logic, escalation workflows, ticketing conventions, and detection priorities.
This is what allows AI teammates to work without creating more work. They fit into your system without forcing you to change it.
When AI handles the routine, the cognitive load on humans decreases. That leads to fewer mistakes, more time to think, and a calmer work environment overall. Analysts regain the ability to do focused, high-value work. They’re not constantly switching contexts or buried in false positives.
This has a cascading effect: satisfaction goes up, turnover goes down, and teams become easier to retain and grow.
The introduction of AI is already reshaping roles. According to SANS, 60% of organizations are evolving job titles and training paths to integrate AI into daily work. This isn’t about automation replacing people. It’s about opening up new kinds of work—like security-focused data science, AI evaluation, and new modes of triage and threat hunting.
It also sends a message: that a security career can grow with the field, not be eroded by it.
The bottom line? Augmentation, when done right, doesn’t just make the work faster. It makes the work feel better. And in a field where burnout is rampant, that might be the most important change AI can bring.
AI is starting to show up everywhere in cybersecurity. The momentum is real, but moving fast doesn’t mean skipping strategy.
Not every tool labeled “AI” will help your team. The ones that make a real difference tend to have a few things in common: they understand your environment, they fit into existing workflows, and they support people without sidelining them.
Another factor to look for? Low-friction onboarding. Whether it’s built-in guidance, role-specific workflows, or actual certification programs, AI tools should help teams ramp up, not slow them down. If learning to use the tool becomes a full-time job, it’s not augmentation. It’s overhead.
The goal isn’t full automation. It’s smart support that helps your team stay sharp, engaged, and motivated.
Imagine a security team where the support never burns out.
We’re working on something that makes that possible.
Get in touch to learn more.
Cybersecurity teams are under immense pressure. The threats are real, the stakes are high, and the expectations keep rising. What’s missing isn’t more ambition, it’s support that scales with the work.
AI-powered augmentation offers a new possibility. Not a replacement for human skill, but a way to protect it. A way to give teams time back, sharpen focus, and make the work feel sustainable again.
If we want better security outcomes, we need to start with the people doing the work and build from there.
EDITED OUT: (Not to be published)
The cybersecurity talent shortage has been discussed to death. What’s less discussed and far more urgent is what’s happening to the people already in the roles. This isn’t just a hiring problem, but a structural one. How security work is distributed, supported, and valued inside organizations is fundamentally flawed.
In addition to being under immense pressure, security professionals today are also running at a deficit. Between constant alert triage, incident escalations, shift work, and back-to-back context switching, there’s rarely time to think deeply, let alone breathe. The mental overhead is stressful, and it’s eroding cognitive sharpness and emotional bandwidth.
The real issue isn’t just how much work there is. It’s how relentless and fragmented it feels. There’s no buffer. There’s no decompression. Even high performers report cognitive fatigue and disengagement because the system doesn’t let them recover.
When something breaks, the security team is often the first to get blamed, even when they flagged the risk months ago. This culture of blame, where leadership leans on security post-incident rather than preemptively, creates a sense of futility. Add in fragmented ownership, unclear escalation paths, and political interference, and you get teams who stop raising concerns—not because they don’t see them, but because it feels like no one’s listening.
Security isn’t failing because it lacks visibility. It’s failing because it lacks authority.
Despite the increasing complexity of cyber threats, many security teams still find themselves excluded from key decisions. They’re looped in too late or brought in only to veto plans, never to help shape them. This has led to the persistent stereotype of security as “the department of no,” a reactive gatekeeper instead of a strategic collaborator.
It’s not a perception issue. It’s an access issue. Professionals can’t do high-value work if they’re left out of the room where those values are set.
In a surprising number of organizations, especially small and mid-sized ones, “the security team” is just one person. That person is responsible for everything: detection, response, tooling, vendor management, compliance, and training. There’s no backup, no second opinion, no division of responsibility. And even in larger orgs, it’s not uncommon for individual contributors to work in silos.
This isolation doesn’t just lead to burnout. It creates avoidable risks and uneven quality across the board.
There’s a growing segment of mid-career professionals who feel stuck. They’ve done the work, gained experience, earned the certs—but when it comes time to move up, they’re overlooked in favor of generalist managers or external hires. Budget cuts have made this worse. In 2024 alone, 25% of organizations laid off cybersecurity talent. In too many cases, advancement opportunities are unclear or non-existent.
Worse still, remote-friendly roles are drying up. For many, the only way forward is relocating—or leaving.
The irony of the skills shortage is that it coexists with impossible entry barriers. Job posts labeled “entry-level” regularly ask for three to five years of experience, multiple certifications, and hands-on knowledge of five different security tools. For newcomers or career-switchers, the path into cybersecurity is opaque and often demoralizing.
Despite all the talk about building the pipeline, the door remains closed for many who are more than capable of contributing—if given a shot.
Context switching is a silent killer. In addition to the mental fatigue, it’s the time lost in fragmented tools, inconsistent workflows, and disconnected data sources. Security teams are constantly jumping between dashboards, consoles, and channels just to piece together a single incident. The cognitive cost is enormous, and the margin for error gets wider every day.
This is how threats get missed. No one can see the whole picture clearly and quickly.
Organizations widely acknowledge the need to upskill. But in practice, most teams are so overloaded they can’t afford the downtime. Over 50% of companies say they lack the time and resources to provide adequate training. That means even seasoned professionals are falling behind, especially as threat vectors shift toward identity, cloud, and AI-powered exploits.
You can’t ask people to level up if they’re stuck on the treadmill, sprinting just to stay in place.
Hiring more staff doesn’t automatically solve anything if the hires don’t match the threat landscape. In fact, 52% of organizations say the real issue isn’t having too few people, it’s having the wrong skill sets. Adding more junior analysts to handle cloud security gaps, for example, won’t work if none of them understand IAM risks or federated access models.
Teams need specific expertise, not general manpower. And that’s exactly what’s in short supply.
Despite everything, security budgets are being slashed. In 2024, 37% of organizations cut cybersecurity spending, even as the cost and complexity of threats continued to rise. The math doesn’t work. Teams are being told to cover more ground with fewer resources, which leads to burnout, mistakes, and missed signals.
It’s not sustainable. And teams know it.
Security professionals are mission-driven by nature. They care about protecting people, systems, and reputations. But in heavily regulated or politically entangled environments, that purpose can get buried. Compliance checklists replace threat modeling. Metrics replace impact. Over time, the work feels hollow.
Eventually, people walk away because the work stops mattering.
When you step back and look at the full picture, the problem isn’t just about hiring. It’s about the conditions under which security professionals are expected to operate. Right now, we’re burning through talent, wasting potential, and designing systems that almost guarantee failure.
Fixing this isn’t just about finding more people. It’s about changing what we’re asking those people to do—and how we support them while they do it.
