Infosec firm Trustwave Holdings has released its 2016 Security Pressures Report, and has found that information security professionals are feeling more under pressure as the security environment continues to become more difficult.

The report, based on a survey of 1,414 in-house information security professionals, found that 63 percent of infosec professionals felt more under pressure in doing their jobs, and 65 percent said that it would get worse in the year ahead, up 9 and 8 percent respectively compared to last year.

A growing shortage of security expertise was nominated as a serious operational pressure, while 40 percent of respondents also complained that they were increasingly under pressure before and after a company board meeting, particularly after a major breach has been making news.

On guard

Given the ever evolving security environment the days of running operational security in house may be coming to an end with 86 percent of respondents saying that they already partner, or plan to partner with a managed security services provider, but at the same time 74 percent said they felt under pressure to select security technologies containing all of the latest features.

Seventy-seven percent said they had been pressured to unveil IT projects that they knew did provide adequate security, while at the same time noting that after the cloud they are now being pressured to implement Internet of Things (IoT) rollouts, which also in itself presented new security risks.

Stress

Customer data and intellectual property theft were nominated as the top two worrying outcomes following an attack or data breach, and a significant number said they needed more staff to cope, with 29 percent saying they wanted to quadruple their staff.

Not surprisingly the third highest post-breach repercussion fear is job loss, coming in at 11 percent.

“Security professionals live in a unique and stressful environment, defined by conflict with faceless attackers as well as internal threats,” Trustwave Chief Marketing Officer Steve Kelley said in a statement sent to SiliconANGLE. “Businesses rely on information security more than ever before and the pressure to show measurable success is taking a toll on security practitioners. The widening gulf between the expected outcomes and the struggle to maintain adequate solutions and staff is driving businesses, now as many as 86 percent of them, to partner with a managed security services provider to relax the pressures and help them achieve their cybersecurity goals.”

A full copy of the report is available here.

Image credit: firesam/Flickr/CC by 2.0