The heavy responsibility of securing organizations against cyberattacks is overwhelming and places more of a burden on security professionals, recent data shows. In fact, fifty-six percent of team members say their job stress is increasing every year and there are no signs of it slowing down for 2023.

Clearly, this growing trend of work-related stress in the area of ​​IT security is not only a concern for the well-being of employees, but also for the health of the security infrastructure for which they are responsible.

Cyber ​​Security Exhaustion makes businesses vulnerable to attacks. Security infrastructure does not work without the expertise of IT personnel and requires proper configuration and routine maintenance for optimal performance.

Symptoms of security burnout include anger, isolation, loss of focus and dissatisfaction at work. Here are some ways to spot potential burnout in your IT department and start addressing the underlying issues.

Why IT Burnout Is Prevalent Right Now

We have asked a lot of our IT departments in recent years: the shift to a hybrid or fully remote workforce, the increased threat of cyberattacks with geopolitical conflicts and a growing awareness of cybersecurity increase the workload.

Of course, increased burden does not always correlate with increased staff, budgets, or general respect for the profession. It’s no wonder the burnout trend is hitting the IT industry particularly hard.

An example of how this burnout can occur in the daily life of an IT professional includes the need for repetitive manual tasks. Repetitive manual tasks, such as system monitoring, incident detection and reporting, are major contributors to IT frustration.

Manual labor causes team members to lose sight of the small details of these tasks due to the sheer volume, as well as their mundane nature. Here are a few ways slippages in repetitive tasks can escalate into bigger problems:

• After searching countless IP addresses, they may neglect to investigate suspicious IP addresses related to spam and malware. System logs from multiple systems help them gather data and timestamps of attack-related events, but an overworked IT pro could easily overlook an anomaly if overloaded.

• Teams forward alerts to affected groups and team members involved in identifying and mitigating an attack. They send emails and slack messages to other teams, and often use ticket systems to alert on-call security specialists. As security personnel become complacent, they may ignore alerts or assume false positives. As a result, other groups ignore attacks and infections can spread.

Solutions to help ease the IT security burden

While the list of assumptions is long, there are concrete solutions to IT burnout that your organization should implement as soon as possible to mitigate the risks and potential consequences of an overworked IT staff.

1. End user training

End-user training enables employees to avoid social engineering attacks such as phishing and business email compromise (BEC). No matter how robust your security systems are, an untrained workforce to recognize the signs of social engineering schemes keep the door open to ransomware. Regularly train your employees in social engineering tests, enforce good password policies, and use multi-factor authentication.

This practice not only protects your network from popular cyberattacks, but it can also reduce the burden on your IT department to resolve these consequences or train end users themselves.

2. Increased funding

With additional funding for security, organizations can increase the number of security professionals to share the load, alleviate frustration, and improve team efficiency and morale. Security experts working well together are as essential as having the right security tools.

Of course, with the looming economic recession in the United States, many organizations are looking to cut costs, and sadly, cybersecurity is on the list. For organizations looking to cut expenses without sacrificing security, the good news is that many of the technology solutions around the most important cybersecurity steps don’t require a lot of expense, such as improved password security and implementing multi-factor authentication.

With the costs of cyberattacks for organizations up 80% in 2022businesses can’t afford not to take these simple, cost-effective steps to increased security.

3. Automate fixes for recurring issues

Automation tools that remove manual effort help workers stay fresh and focused and can alleviate some of the burden that manual repetitive tasks bring to the job description. Take the advice of your IT teams and implement technology-enabled solutions where possible, even if it’s an upfront investment of time or money, it can save you ten times more on the whole line.

An example of a repetitive and all-too-common IT problem, especially in the hybrid workplace, is end-user password resets. For computer support services, a Onelogin study found that more than 37% of companies spent more than 6 hours per week resetting passwords. It’s time for a help desk employee to be able to focus on other more critical tasks and reduce the repetitive manual work of resetting a frustrated employee’s password.

The best way for an organization to alleviate this recurring problem for their IT department is to give users a self-service password reset solution. uReset Specifications offers a variety of features to allow users to reset their passwords from anywhere, with any device, without the need for a time-consuming and potentially costly IT help desk call.

Plus, the added layer of security further alleviates cyberattack worries for IT pros.

Sponsored and written by Specops software