Safeguarding your business from a growing number of cyberattacks is no easy feat especially when you consider how smarter hackers and cybercriminals have become in the last decade. They can find vulnerabilities in most secure systems and exploit those vulnerabilities before it can be patched.

What’s even worse is the fact that IT professionals face added friction in their work environments, which make their jobs even more difficult. Couple that with talent shortfall in the cybersecurity industry, digital transformation, leadership support and IT process limitations and you will have your work cut out. Sometimes, company culture can also be a limiting factor.

In this article, you will learn about eight hurdles that IT professionals need to get over to do their job effectively.

8 Hurdles IT Professionals Face

Here are eight hurdles IT professionals encounter when performing their jobs.

1.  Financial Constraints

Irrespective of how good your security strategy might be, it will be useless if you don’t have the budget to implement it. Most security experts consider budget constraints as one of the biggest hurdles IT professionals face. What’s even worse, is that organziation decide on their cybersecurity budget without understanding.the security and risk management requirements.

As a result, they end up allocating fewer funds, which puts more pressure on your cybersecurity team. As a result, IT pros have to wear multiple hats and are left with little to no time for training and mastering the cybersecurity tools. This puts a negative impact on the overall productivity of your IT team and makes it difficult for cybersecurity professionals to give their best.

2.  Talent Shortfall

One of the biggest issues in the cybersecurity industry is a talent shortfall. With millions of unfilled jobs in the cybersecurity industry and fresh graduates struggling to fill those jobs with the right skillset, we might expect this issue to continue in the near future. This makes it difficult for businesses to find the right candidates. Train your existing employees to cover the talent shortfall gap. Organize cybersecurity training programs and evaluate the effectiveness of these training programs. Find and hire candidates that have the application knowledge and infrastructure to support the role. 

3.  Employee Burnout

With acute talent shortfall prevailing in the IT and cybersecurity industry, the workload on each employee is higher. They are expected to juggle multiple balls at once without dropping any one of them. This can subject them to employee burnout. That is why most IT professionals tend to switch careers or quit their jobs during their careers.

According to a report, 51% of cybersecurity professionals experienced extreme work related stress and burnout last year. Employees who are subject to burnout and work related stress are more likely to make mistakes and miss key threat warning signs. This also leaves them with no time for routine maintenance, which could have serious security consequences in the long run.

The best way to overcome this situation is to implement efficient processes and effective tools. Automate mundane tasks so your cybersecurity team can focus on more important tasks. By removing friction and automating mundane tasks, you can reduce the burden off the shoulders of your IT team. 

4.  Losing Visibility

One of the biggest hindrances in helping clients respond to cybersecurity attacks is lack of visibility. That is why they should invest in DDoS protection. You can never be able to contain a threat without having complete visibility into the system. Despite this, most IT professionals lack a configuration management database, which hampers the visibility and their ability to respond to cybersecurity incidents in an efficient manner.

5.  Tool Fatigue

The sheer numbers of tools enterprises use these days are mind boggling. Managing all these tools at once can take its toll on your employees. You might have to switch back and forth between dozens of dashboards. No matter how many different monitors you add, this is not easy. Since, every tool comes with its own user interface and workflow, it can drain you mentally. With low attention spans and shrinking memories, cybersecurity professionals have a hard time juggling all these tools at once, which leads them to tool fatigue or dashboard fatigue. We have not even touched upon the altar fatigue problem yet.

6.  Firefighting

In today’s highly vulnerable business environment where hackers are always looking for vulnerabilities to exploit, it is ironic to see that most businesses lack an incident response plan. Due to this, they have no choice but to resort to fire fighting techniques instead of having a defined plan and steps. All other security tasks get postponed and the only thing on the mind of the cybersecurity team was to extinguish the fire.

You need to develop robust security controls and perform environment hardening while looking for new threats which have not yet been discovered. This way, you can minimize the risk. Having an incident response plan at your disposal will give your team a direction to move in as they know what steps they need to take during a cyberattack.

7.  Lack of Support

Ask anyone working in the cybersecurity industry about the challenges and they will certainly list lack of support and buy-in from top stakeholders and business leaders. The problem is that if you don’t have their support, you won’t be able to succeed because security risk is usually managed by stakeholders outside of the security team. From system administrators to software development teams, all play an important role in minimizing the risk. You need to have friendly relations with all these stakeholders and show perseverance in order to achieve success.

8.  Meeting Mania

If all these obstacles were not enough to prevent IT professionals from doing their job, useless meetings add to the long list. Since IT professionals have a lot on their plate, they can not afford to waste their time. Sadly, that is exactly what pointless meetings do. It steals precious time from their schedule which can be used for more productive activities.

As a result, they are left with little time for value driven tasks. The best way to overcome this issue is to minimize the number of meetings and only call participants who are directly involved. Have an agenda and communicate it to all the participants beforehand to make meetings more meaningful.

Which obstacles do you encounter when doing your job as an IT professional? Share it with us in the comments section below.