Talent shortages leave businesses more exposed to attacks

Whether it's down to the Great Resignation or a lack of the correct skills, security and development teams are struggling to find and retain enough skilled staff.

A new study released today by cybersecurity company Cobalt finds that 45 percent of security respondents say their department is currently experiencing a shortage of employees.

The study uses a survey of over 600 security and development professionals and analysis of data from more than 2,000 pentests to quantify the impact of the labor shortage on security and development teams.

It finds that 90 percent of respondents who have suffered shortages or lost team members are struggling with workload management. 96 percent of security teams say they see a slower response to patching critical vulnerabilities as a result.

Only seven percent of development teams say they have been adequately staffed for at least six months and expect to continue that way for the next six. The majority (97 percent) of developers say that these challenges make it harder to meet critical deadlines for feature launches, and 80 percent say that these challenges compromise the quality and security of developers' code.

Writing on the Cobalt blog Jay Paz, director of pentest operations and research, says, "The challenges our research found are difficult, but they're not impossible to solve. Download The State of Pentesting 2022 for a closer look at what organizations can do to manage their vulnerabilities and retain talent amid The Great Resignation -- and how Pentest as a Service (PtaaS) can help."

You can read more and get the full State of Pentesting 2022 report on the Cobalt blog.

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