Having access to the right information can reduce burnout in cybersecurity teams

Burnout continues to be a big problem affecting employee performance. While some companies have come up with solutions to deal with employee burnout, not every department can have the luxury of taking work lightly.

The IT department is not able to take a break without ensuring they have a proper system in place to ensure there is no disruption or cyber incidents. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, IT teams continue to face increasing tasks, apart from their daily workloads.

While IT teams are managing the increased workload, the reality is, the number of tasks at hand can sometimes be  too much to handle. For example, the CISO would now have the extra tasks of dealing with increased IT requests from remote working teams and such.

In fact, Gartner’s research found that eight out of ten CIOs don’t make consider fatigue involved in their conversations about business technology initiatives. Gartner suggests CIOs set guidelines for how their teams should do their work, which helps ensure that the multidisciplinary teams share accountability for results and focus on delivering business outcomes, not merely completing a project plan.

This is where technology can play a role. According to Christopher Chai, Solution Director APJC at Hackuity, while organizations have automated tasks, there are still some processes that are done manually. For example, in threat monitoring and detection, the detection part is still done manually, whereby IT teams spend a lot of hours analyzing data and such.

“There is a lot of manual effort put in to assess vulnerabilities and findings that are being reported by different scanners. And from there, the team is using many resources on just analyzing the data, but not about how they want to process and then go about to see how they can strengthen their cybersecurity parameter to prevent this kind of issue from happening again,” said Chai.

Chai believes organizations should look into plugging in these gaps, by consolidating everything under a single pane of glass, rather than having a fractured view from different tools. The process can also be easily automated by prioritizing formulas that need to be worked on immediately instead of looking at spreadsheets.

“This also includes the downstream remediation workflow, where right now we still see organizations sending emails to notify the stakeholders. We want to remove that manual task by just having a platform that can automate all these notifications to the stakeholders, and track the progress automatically,” added Chai.

Here’s where Hackuity’s Exposure Management platform comes in. By providing organizations with a single pane of glass view, organizations will have a focused view that shows everything they need to know. Simply put, IT teams can put in more time and effort to do patching based on the right information.

“We know that because of the burnout issue, there will be a high churn rate, and then there’ll be skill shortages. We want to make sure that a platform can be there to automate this process. And this platform should be easy for the user to adopt. We don’t want to add to the workload. Hence, the platform is designed to be intuitive so that any team member that needs to understand how to use it can pick up the skill in a very timely fashion. And then they just only focus on the strategic costs, rather than just going through the technical stuff of checking or eyeballing the data. That’s what we want to avoid,” explained Chai.

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