Nearly half of cybersecurity leaders are likely to change jobs by 2025, 25% for different roles entirely due to work-related stress, according to research by Gartner.

The report suggests that stress factors, as well as the massive market opportunities for cybersecurity professionals, means that talent churn poses a significant threat for security teams. Gartner’s research shows that compliance-centric cybersecurity programs, low executive support and subpar industry-level maturity are all indicators of an organisation that does not view security risk management as critical to business success.

Deepti Gopal, director analyst at Gartner, said: “Cybersecurity professionals are facing unsustainable levels of stress. CISOs are on the defence, with the only possible outcomes that they don’t get hacked or they do. The psychological impact of this directly affects decision quality and the performance of cybersecurity leaders and their teams.”

He added: “Burnout and voluntary attrition are outcomes of poor organisational culture. While eliminating stress is an unrealistic goal, people can manage incredibly challenging and stressful jobs in cultures where they’re supported.”

Gartner predicts that by 2025, lack of talent or human failure will be responsible for over half of significant cyber incidents. It warns that the number of cyber and social engineering attacks against people is spiking as threat actors increasingly see humans as the most vulnerable point of exploitation.

A Gartner survey conducted in May and June 2022 among 1,310 employees revealed that 69% of employees have bypassed their organisation’s cybersecurity guidance in the past 12 months. In the survey, 74% of employees said they would be willing to bypass cybersecurity guidance if it helped them or their team achieve a business objective.

Paul Furtado, VP analyst at Gartner, said: “Friction that slows down employees and leads to insecure behaviour is a significant driver of insider risk.”

To confront this rising threat, Gartner predicts that half of medium to large enterprises will adopt formal programs to manage insider risk by 2025, up from 10% today. Furtado added that a focused insider risk management program should proactively and predictively identify behaviours that may result in the potential exfiltration of corporate assets or other damaging actions and provide corrective guidance, not punishment: “CISOs must increasingly consider insider risk when developing a cybersecurity program. Traditional cybersecurity tools have limited visibility into threats that come from within.”

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