The Cybersecurity Staffing Gap: Four Ways to Get Hours Back

An ongoing challenge for every IT and security team is managing consistent uptime, adaptive security, and the costs of human resources.

This consumes a great deal of time and expense, and for many teams, it’s an infinite marathon. Moving from one product console to another, evaluating alerts and reports in silos, and trying to manage a finite number of resources becomes a never ending cycle, with limited time for strategic assessment.

Most teams are running that marathon short-handed, and the data is not subtle about it.

The cybersecurity staffing gap hits mid-market teams hardest

ISACA surveyed more than 3,800 cybersecurity professionals for its 2025-2026 State of Cybersecurity report. 55% say their cyber teams are understaffed. 65% have unfilled cybersecurity positions.

ISC2 puts a finer point on it. In its 2025 Cybersecurity Workforce Study, based on 16,029 practitioners surveyed in May and June of 2025, 33% said they do not have the resources to adequately staff their teams, and 47% described themselves as overwhelmed by their workload.

Mid-market teams carry that gap against outsized risk. The 2025 Verizon DBIR SMB Snapshot, the most recent SMB-specific edition Verizon has published, found that 88% of breaches at organizations under 1,000 employees involved ransomware, against 39% at large organizations. Smaller teams are not facing proportionally smaller threats. Enterprise-grade risk, operator-sized team.

Meanwhile the environment keeps expanding. OT, IoT, cloud, SaaS, and now AI applications all connect to the same network. In our experience, OT and IoT alone can represent up to 50% of the connections in an environment. PwC’s 2026 Global Digital Trust Insights survey of 3,887 executives found that 47% cite a lack of qualified personnel as a top challenge in securing operational technology and industrial IoT.

The part of the estate that is hardest to see is also the part nobody is staffed for.

The problem isn’t effort. It’s where the effort goes.

Look at what happens to the work that does get done. The 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, built on more than 22,000 breaches across 145 countries, found that exploitation of vulnerabilities is now the top initial access vector at 31%, up from 20% the year before.

Here is the part that should stop you. In that same dataset, only 26% of vulnerabilities on CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog were fully remediated, down from 38% the year before. Median time to full remediation stretched to 43 days, up from 32.

Those are the vulnerabilities everyone already knows about, published on a government list, ranked by known exploitation. Remediation of them is getting slower and less complete, year over year.

That is not an awareness problem. It’s a capacity problem.

Capacity comes from two places: more people, or less manual work per person. Adding headcount is the honest answer, and for most of the teams we work with, it’s not an answer they can fund or fill. Which leaves the second lever, and that’s where most stacks are working against their own teams. Another console, another contract, another set of alerts to correlate by hand, and another product to learn is not capacity. It’s overhead wearing a capability label.

What changes when the work arrives already prioritized

The UncommonX approach is different. Rather than approach each tool individually, our system discovers, analyzes, and prioritizes every tool and signal to create a comprehensive, accurate, single pane of glass for all events and alerts in a system. Users view risks and understand their potential impact from one place.

That visibility extends through every device and application connected to the environment: IT, OT, IoT, cloud, and even AI and SaaS applications. It makes a significant difference in understanding exposure, setting priorities, and allocating resources.

Visibility alone is not the point. What matters to a lean team is what arrives next. Rather than see that there is a firewall alert, the system quantifies the alert, triages the remediation, and provides explicit steps for the IT engineer or security analyst to follow. The analysis your team would have done manually is already done when they sit down.

Four places an understaffed security team gets time back

Focus on the right alerts

No chasing alerts and wading through noisy messages. No logging into multiple consoles trying to correlate data and define a plan. The platform does it for you.

Remediation made easy

Once an issue is identified, the system generates explicit instructions to resolve it and protect the environment. In some cases, using our AI agents, the system can provide triage and remediation with little or no user support.

Technology optimization

Our system often discovers that existing point solutions, configurations, and expenditures are misaligned with the team’s requirements and goals. Most of the time we can improve security and performance through better use of products already in place, while removing redundant or unnecessary tools. That’s where security tool consolidation stops being a slide and starts being a line item.

Team optimization

Imagine an environment where your team members are given explicit instructions to address the highest priority issues, the ability to measure and track risk and remediation, and access to a team of security and IT experts who extend their reach and expertise.

Each of these items generates its own positive impact. In combination, they create a more sustainable, resilient, and cost effective operational footprint.

What it’s worth: hours and dollars

When we work with customers, they often feel overwhelmed, unable to deploy resources effectively no matter the cost, and perpetually seeking new staffing. What typically changes is not the size of the team. It’s what the team spends its week on.

One large county government consolidated with us and documented $260,000 in annual savings: $150,000 from eliminating a third-party SIEM and its storage, $60,000 in avoided system planning and management, and $50,000 in avoided risk and compliance work. That last $110,000 is staff time, returned. The headcount never changed.

Our customers do not add us. They consolidate with us. Fewer consoles, one contract, and a team working the list that actually matters.

Now that’s uncommon security. See everything. Miss nothing. Book a demo today.