The Stress is Real: More Support is Needed for CISOs at SMBs

Complicated, resource-draining cybersecurity woes should be a thing of the past.

This is Cynet's focus. The company's mission is to make cybersecurity easy; to look at current (and too-expensive) approaches, determine how they've been broken, and to develop stress-free cybersecurity-on-autopilot solutions, instead.

As an end-to-end, fully automated Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platform with 24/7 Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services, Cynet pays close attention to midmarket organizations, delivering easy-to-deploy-and-use, natively automated cybersecurity solutions for lean security teams. Cynet protects their networks and systems (regardless of variable staff sizes, skill levels, or existing resources).

In its recently released "Implications of Stress on CISOs 2023 Report," Cynet surveyed chief information security officers (CISOs) at SMBs with security teams of five or fewer team members.

The objective? To understand stress levels and mental health impacts.

The report shows that 94% of CISOs are over-stressed at work, and 65% of them admit work-related stresses are affecting their ability to protect their organizations.

That kind of compromise should plague neither the individuals nor the risks to organizations' securities. More support is needed. And since all of the surveyed CISOs (indeed all of them, Cynet found) admitted that additional resources are required in order to adequately cope with current security challenges in IT, Cynet dug deeper to learn more.

Per the report, 74% of CISOs claim to have lost team members due to higher work-induced stresses; nearly half (47%) had at least one member exit a role in the last year. Relatedly, recruiting new staff has been a challenge; 83% of CISOs have had trouble filling gaps. This left more than a whopping third of CISOs either thinking about a departure from their own roles, or them legitimately having actively looked for one already.

Overall, Cynet's report reveals that automated tools are necessary to manage CISOs' repetitive tasks (and to better train employees and outsource various responsibilities) in attempts to consolidate workplace issues and decrease compromising stresses. CISOs shouldn't have to miss private events (as 64% said they had) due to work fatigue, nor should vacations be cancelled (per a larger 84%) because of limited bandwidth leading to security initiatives suffering.

Day-to-day routines for CISOs and their teams require tremendous improvements, not poor policies or cost-cutting that result in well-beings falling by the wayside, Cynet reported.

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