The Great Resignation may be damaging the ability of cybersecurity companies to defend against attacks, as talent shortages and burn out are cited as negatively affecting projects, according to a new report from Software company Splunk.
Splunk's 2022 state of cybersecurity report surveyed more than 1,000 leaders in cybersecurity across a range of industries, including healthcare, to find out which are the biggest challenges facing the field in 2022.
Over a quarter of leaders (26 percent) said they were dealing with challenges of understaffing, up from only 22 percent in 2021 and 87 percent of all respondents reporting skills or talent related issues. Over 53 percent of cybersecurity leaders said that they can't hire enough staff and 85 percent said over the last 12 months, it has gotten harder to recruit and retain talent.
This pressure on talent and staffing is also having direct consequences on current workers. Seventy-six percent of respondents said that they've been forced to take on responsibilities they were not prepared for, and 70 percent have said that the increase in workload has spurred them to look for new opportunities. A concerning figure was that 68 percent of talent shortages led directly to the failure of one or more cybersecurity projects.