Cybersecurity burnout is a growing crisis, with 62% of professionals reporting burnout due to long hours, limited resources, unrealistic expectations, and constant threat overload—often worsened by false positives from security tools. Azul Intelligence Cloud helps reduce this burden by identifying only used vulnerable Java code, minimizing false alerts and automating routine security tasks. Combined with Azul Platform Core’s regular and emergency patches, these tools lighten the load for cybersecurity teams, improve threat response, and help prevent burnout by reducing mental strain, increasing accuracy, and supporting healthier work-life balance.
From June to July 2023, Gartner surveyed 178 information security and cybersecurity IT professionals. 62% of security professionals experienced burnout at least once, and 44% experienced burnout multiple times. (Gartner, Cybersecurity Leaders Are Burned Out)
Business and technical leaders are challenged with safeguarding enterprise systems and customer data amidst a rapid increase of known vulnerabilities in third-party components and applications. More than 5,000 critical vulnerabilities (CVEs) were disclosed in 2023. Neglecting to identify and patch these vulnerabilities in their Java applications can result in severe consequences, including financial penalties, compromised customer data, decreased market capitalization, and turnover among executive staff. But CVE detection tools typically flag far more vulnerabilities that are actually present. Investigating all of these false positives leads to cybersecurity burnout.
What Is Cybersecurity Burnout?
Cybersecurity engineers, managers, and IT professionals are feeling physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion. This burnout results in decreased performance, a lack of motivation, irritability, increased anxiety, or even forms of depression. This also results in a high turnover rate in cybersecurity roles.
Cybersecurity professionals feel overwhelmed for several reasons:
- Responsibilities: Cybersecurity professionals often feel pressured to protect data and infrastructure from growing threats. According to Gartner, 65% thought they had too many responsibilities. According to a study from BlackFog, almost a quarter of CISOs and IT Security Decision Makers plan to leave their jobs, and 93% of them say it’s due to an overwhelming stress. Cyberthreats are increasing as AI-driven attacks adds complexity and stress to their jobs.
- Long hours: To keep up with a backlog of threats, they often find themselves working extended hours. Per the Gartner study, 62% of cybersecurity professionals felt pressure to work late nights or weekends.
- Lack of resources: 46% feel like they are lacking resources in their organization or have no resources. This leads cybersecurity professionals to feel like they are taking on an overwhelming workload.
- Expectations: 37% think their team or manager has unrealistic expectations of their capabilities and their project outcomes.
- Isolation: 36% feel isolated. Cybersecurity professionals find themselves spending long periods of time focusing on their work in solidarity. Many cybersecurity roles are remote, which limits their social interaction. Also, the sensitive nature of cybersecurity issues means they often can’t discuss their work with others.
- Fear: 32% are afraid that the risk of security incidents negatively impacts their reputation and career.
- Team morale: 32% of those Gartner polled thought there was a low morale on their cybersecurity team. The other issues reduce the team members’ spirits, which affects the culture and productivity of the team.
- Monotony: Repetitive and monotonous tasks have led to mental fatigue among cybersecurity professionals.
According to Gartner, only 46% of those experiencing cybersecurity burnout told their managers, and 31% of those who didn’t tell their managers said they feared negative repercussions. Of the cybersecurity professionals who told their managers, 27% thought their manager didn’t help them deal with the problem.
Avoiding Cybersecurity Burnout
To avoid cybersecurity burnout, organizations should ensure their cybersecurity team receives adequate training, support, and resources needed to do their jobs. Management can work with their team members to ensure they maintain a work-life balance and have proper expectations on their workload and capabilities. They should build a collaborative work environment where cybersecurity team members share best practices, common patterns, and lessons learned. This collaborative approach helps team members learn from each other, encourage each other, and grow in their overall abilities.
Azul Intelligent Cloud and Java Cybersecurity Burnout
Azul Intelligence Cloud (IC) is a cloud-based service that allows users to continuously monitor their Java applications to find vulnerabilities in production and then generate a variety of reports. See Azul Vulnerability Detection.
IC offers features that help mitigate cybersecurity burnout when building and securing Java applications:
- Reducing false alerts: IC provides production-code analysis and class-level detection of CVEs, which at a much more granular level than JAR level (Java ARchive). The combination of these two methods reduces false alerts to a mere fraction of what cybersecurity professionals deal with today.
- Automation: Because IC automates routine tasks in vulnerability detection and building a Code Inventory, it reduces the workload on cybersecurity professionals, allowing them to focus on more complex and high-impact projects.
- Advanced analytics: IC collects information about your software systems in production. By using the JVM to retain information about loaded code, IC can apply analysis to look back and see where new vulnerabilities are used and/or present, and what code and components are used. By quickly identifying and responding to threats and vulnerabilities, this reduces the stress caused to developers and cybersecurity managers.
Collectively, these features help reduce the mental and physical strain on cybersecurity professionals.
Azul Platform Core and Java Cybersecurity Burnout
How does Azul Platform Core (APC) help your organization mitigate burnout among cybersecurity professionals? Platform Core helps alleviate cybersecurity burnout through several key features:
- Regular updates: APC provides quarterly Critical Patch Updates (CPUs) that address known CVEs.
- Out-of-cycle updates: Timely patches address zero-day vulnerabilities, as well as functional regression issues that arise between (or go unaddressed by) quarterly updates.
- Reliability: APC provides robust support and reliable performance to minimize any unexpected issues that would add further stress and responsibility to your cybersecurity team.
For more information about how Azul can help reduce cybersecurity burnout and help you secure your Java application, see Azul Intelligence Cloud and Azul Platform Core.
