47% Of Companies Want To Downsize Their Cybersecurity Department

47% Of Companies Want To Downsize Their Cybersecurity Department

Time Stamp: December 8, 2023 11:50 AM

Tyler Cross Tyler Cross
Published on: December 8, 2023

According to a report done by Observe & CITE, 47% of businesses are looking to downsize their cybersecurity departments.

There were 500 security experts interviewed, including people filtered from prominent cybersecurity departments like CISO, as well as Incident response managers, information security analysts, and even directors of cyber security with various companies.

To break it down further, 47% of responders said that they had no intentions of downsizing their cybersecurity departments. 47% claimed that they were planning on lowering the headcount of their departments.

The remaining 6% were unsure about which direction their company should head. This is a 4% growth over the prior survey.

However, the companies that intend to downsize are also statistically more likely to face hundreds of more cyber incidents per month than companies moving in the opposite direction. This can lead to a serious loss of profit and the entire company’s reputation being damaged.

A business’s attempt to save money by cutting its cybersecurity departments is likely to have a trickle effect that costs more money in the end. A company that relies on AI or cloud-based technology to protect themselves still sees a rising need for cybersecurity personnel.

“Even though our entire respondent base is over halfway to cloud native, it would seem that the cloud infrastructure doesn’t provide sufficient operations or security observability on its own and agents must be used,” reads Observe’s report. “While automation has been a security goal for a very long time, the current reality remains heavily people-powered.”

It can also be hard for older businesses to upgrade their security systems.

“Given the number of incidents organizations are combating and the time they have to respond to them, they can ill afford to spend time context switching between tools,” the report said.

Global cyber attacks are on the rise, according to ISC2’s Cybersecurity Workforce Study, the gap between the amount of professionals needed and their availability is at an all-time high.

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