Disconnected IT teams, a culture of blame, and a “war room”-style approach to incident management are hampering enterprise security operations, according to new research.
A study by Dynatrace found that 91% of organizations still play the blaming game on IT service providers after serious incidents, which is creating a fractured relationship between businesses and providers that damages both relationships. long term and the ability to react to emerging threats.
According to Dynatrace, this blame game leads to an increasing reliance on war room-style meetings to address cyber incidents, which in turn extends the duration of the incident and creates tense work environments.
Dynatrace revealed that 49% of IT teams felt exhausted by these war rooms, and 46% admitted that their work caused them to lose personal time during nights and weekends.
Additionally, 21% of IT professionals have considered changing jobs or even a complete career change due to the increased stress associated with their position.
Rob Van Lubek, Dynatrace's vice president for EMEA, said he believes war room-style incident management is particularly detrimental to businesses, as it not only frequently fails to solve the problem, but also harms company culture. office, affects employee retention and exacerbates skills. shortage.
“War rooms are an extremely negative approach to solving problems and, in the context of a continuing skills shortage, can significantly deepen resourcing challenges for many organizations,” he said.
Van Lubek described the increasingly burdensome expectations placed on IT staff as unsustainable, warning that companies cannot continue to operate under previous labor standards.
“What seemed like a normal situation five years ago is no longer acceptable for many IT professionals, who have reevaluated their work-life balance during the shift to hybrid work,” he explained.
The high-stress environment of war rooms and the looming threat of emergency conference calls at any hour of the day can lead to a disenfranchised and disengaged workforce that is constantly searching for its next employer.”
Psychological safety is key
Dynatrace's findings also showed that reliance on siled monitoring tools and manual processes across multiple enterprises amplifies the challenges created by war room-style incident response.
Only 29% of respondents said their organization uses a single platform and the same data to monitor and manage their digital services.
The result is that each professional has a different reference point when approaching a particular problem and therefore ends up working from separate truth values. In the long term, this further fuels a confrontational office culture defined by blaming other teams.
Dynatrace stated that this makes teams more reluctant to take ownership of issues, resulting in longer incident response times or issues that are not fully addressed.
Fostering a culture where team members feel comfortable expressing their opinions, taking calculated risks, and raising concerns or mistakes should be a priority for companies looking to retain staff and improve productivity.
This concept of trust and stability in the workplace is often called psychological safety and, according to experts, should be a priority for organizations.
Van Lubek added that if they want to retain skilled IT staff, companies must redefine how their teams work together within the organization, as well as how they collaborate with external parties.
