Unlocking the Future of Cybersecurity: How Automation Can Alleviate the CISO’s Growing Burden

Leonid Belkind, the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Torq, explains how automation can alleviate the pressure Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are under. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

The CISO role has shifted rapidly over the past few years to include additional pressures. Many CISO’s responsibilities are moving from IT-focused implementations to now including managing developing regulations, talent shortages, and company siloes, all while bringing the highest level of security to their organization. CISOs are also managing significant risks related to regulatory compliance, adequate security controls, and levels of efficient operational discipline.

With many CISOs overwhelmed, automation can significantly change their landscape by implementing secure workflows that increase efficiency for overwhelmed SecOps teams and have regulatory compliance built in. There are several issues plaguing the modern CISO, and I believe automation is the key they need to unlock their organization’s full potential and maximize ROI. This also relates to oversight over security controls and operational efficiency, as they are directly impacted by adopting automation as a core operational paradigm.

The CISO’s Current Conundrum 

The modern CISO is plagued by several issues, including the heightened security risks introduced by modern hackers, rising expectations for companies to comply with developing regulations and increasing talent shortages. The technology landscape has been changing as companies feel increasingly insecure about keeping their networks and data out of the hands of hackers with malicious intent.

There has been an increase in cyber threats over the past couple of years, with a 72 percent increase in attacks from 2021 to 2023. This number continues to increase as cybercriminals become savvier in their attempts to infiltrate. The threats never stop and the government is beginning to take notice.

In the U.S. in 2024 alone, there were seven pieces of legislation advanced by the House Committee on Homeland Security. Given the CISO is responsible for keeping their organization in line with new regulations and reporting rules, they’re facing a major burden of balancing the compliance of their organization while keeping up with the rapidly evolving threats facing their teams and organizations as a whole. A key way to help tackle this is through establishing cybersecurity benchmarks in order to keep up with the changing regulations.

This leads to the last challenge faced by CISOs, which is the issue of talent shortages. The cyber landscape is changing at a rapid pace, with new threats abound and hackers consistently trying to break through. This necessitates a strong workforce of cyber pros who are highly trained to stop malicious actors. However, this is not the reality modern CISOs face. The cybersecurity workforce has a gap of 4.8 million globally. Additionally, cybersecurity job satisfaction is declining by 66 percent, meaning that those who enter the workforce might not plan on staying. This poses challenges to CISOs who want to employ, train, and retain employees.

Maximizing ROI with Automation: Boosting Efficiency, Employee Satisfaction, and Bottom-Line Savings 

When automation is implemented, there is a huge ROI gain, both on a monetary and human level. Automation allows companies to stay more competitive and efficient by streamlining business processes. The benefits of automation include increased efficiency and productivity, cost savings, improved accuracy, reduced errors, and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Human ROI comes from employees being happy at their jobs. Automation helps decrease the workload for employees, thus allowing them to be more content in their roles. In turn, happy employees show a 12 percent increase in productivity. As previously mentioned, the number of employees within the cyber industry is decreasing due to feeling overwhelmed with their work. Therefore, it is imperative that employees are happy and want to stay within the cybersecurity industry.

As employees are happier at their jobs, they want to stay in their jobs, which increases ROI, specifically 75 percent of a worker’s annual salary, that will be saved on training new employees. In addition to human ROI, automation helps save companies money. Over three years, companies can save $31.3 million from implementing automation. Improved accuracy and reduced errors increase monetary ROI by ensuring that their products and services are of the best quality and eliminating errors that could be costly to fix.

The Future of Automation: How AI and Hyperautomation Can Alleviate the CISO’s Burden

Current innovations in automation can unburden the CISO should they come to fruition. A lot of the CISO’s stress comes from a lack of innovation within automation as a plethora of companies continue to deal with cybersecurity attacks.

There are some major developments occurring within the cybersecurity space. One of the biggest innovations within AI is the growth of Generative AI-based hyperautomation agents. With more companies trusting AI agents, it is believed that AI agents could beneficially outnumber humans. This is important for CISOs because it would continue to increase efficiency within the company.

Additionally, it would allow for automation to be further implemented, thus cutting back on time and costs and, therefore, overall helping the CISO. Furthermore, hyperautomation would allow this to be taken one step further by allowing technology to drive a plethora of tasks. Hyperautomation combines automation technology with AI in order to allow technology to make more human-like decisions. This would improve CISOs’ work as it would allow for greater efficiency resembling human capabilities.

The role of the CISO remains critical, with pressures continuing to increase and the elements of the job in constant flux. Generative AI, AI Agents, and Hyperautomation are unignorable advances that benefit them, their organizations, and their customer and partner ecosystems. They’re moving the needle forward for their entire ecosystem, and embracing them is now a critical imperative.