IT security teams are working themselves to death. BBC recently reported on cybersecurity professionals putting in 60-70 hour weeks trying to keep up with threats, patches, and access requests. This is especially true for smaller organizations with limited IT budgets.
But crunching is counterproductive. Security work demands precision, vigilance, and clear thinking under pressure, and when your team is running on fumes those capabilities disappear.
How Burnout Creates Security Holes
Stretched IT teams develop specific, measurable problems that directly impact your security posture.
1. Response Times Slow Down
Late-night alerts get acknowledged but not properly investigated until morning, giving attackers hours to move through your network. Research from IBM shows that the longer a breach goes undetected, the more expensive it becomes, and tired teams simply can’t move fast enough to contain threats before they spread.
2. Access Requests Pile Up
Overworked IT staff become bottlenecks for basic operations. Users who need admin rights to install legitimate software end up waiting hours or days for approval.
When people can’t get their work done through official channels, they download unauthorized tools, share credentials, or create shadow IT solutions that bypass your security controls entirely. Your burned-out IT team ends up directly causing the security-bypassing behavior you’re trying to prevent.
3. Mistakes Multiply
Configuration errors become more frequent when people are exhausted. NIST research on security fatigue shows that weariness leads to decision avoidance, impulsive choices, and failure to follow security procedures.
A misconfigured firewall rule, an overly permissive access policy, or a critical patch that doesn’t get applied because someone was too tired to double-check the deployment schedule all stem from the same problem.
4. People Quit
Burned-out employees leave and take institutional knowledge with them. All that informal understanding of your network’s quirks, the undocumented workarounds, the historical context for why certain policies exist—gone when they walk out the door.
That’s not even mentioning the financial cost. Replacing an employee typically costs 50-200% of their annual salary when you factor in recruitment, training, and lost productivity.
The Security Debt Problem
When your team spends all their time fighting fires, proactive security work gets pushed aside. Threat hunting, security architecture improvements, and employee training all get deferred because there’s always an emergency to handle right now.
This creates security debt that accumulates over time, making your environment more vulnerable and your team’s job even harder. That increased difficulty burns them out further, which creates more security debt in a self-feeding cycle.
Breaking the Cycle
Telling your IT team to take vacation days won’t fix this, though they definitely should. The fundamental issue is workload, and that requires structural changes to how work gets done.
One of the biggest time drains for IT teams is the constant stream of access requests. Every software installation, every privilege elevation, every routine task that requires admin rights generates another ticket that sits in the queue waiting for someone to review and approve it.
This creates a double problem. IT staff spend hours each day rubber-stamping routine requests that don’t need human judgment, taking time away from actual security work. Meanwhile, users sit around waiting for approval to do basic tasks, which either kills their productivity or pushes them to find workarounds that bypass security entirely.
Admin By Request EPM handles this differently. Instead of requiring manual approval for every request, it uses predefined policies to automatically grant access when appropriate:
- Pre-approval rules can whitelist trusted applications based on vendor certificates or file locations
- Machine learning can identify patterns in what gets approved and handle routine requests automatically
- Unusual requests still get flagged for human review
The solution takes this further with AI-assisted approval that assigns popularity scores to applications and vendors. IT administrators set thresholds for what level of trust triggers automatic approval, and the system handles the rest.
Your IT team focuses on genuinely suspicious requests instead of spending their day clicking “approve” on the same software installations over and over.
Self-Service Without Compromise
Users need ways to help themselves without opening tickets or waiting for someone to approve every request.
Our EPM solution offers two approaches depending on what users need to do. For developers and power users who need broader access, IT administrators can disable approval requirements for time-limited admin sessions. Users can start these sessions on demand through the system tray, become temporary administrators for a set period, and everything they do gets logged with a full audit trail.
For more targeted needs, pre-approval rules and machine learning (covered earlier) handle per-app elevation automatically. IT administrators can configure policies based on vendor certificates, file locations, or specific checksums. When a user tries to run a pre-approved application with elevated rights, it just works without waiting for manual approval. Unusual applications that don’t match any pre-approval rules or AI-assisted approval thresholds still get flagged for human review.
This means users handle routine tasks themselves while IT maintains control through the policies they’ve configured. IT teams get breathing room to focus on actual security work instead of acting as gatekeepers for every minor administrative task.
Build Operations That Don’t Require Heroics
No IT team can sustain 70-hour weeks, manually approve every access request, or remain the sole bottleneck for privileged operations across your entire organization. Long-term sustainable security means accepting these limitations and building operations around them.
An organization’s security is only as strong as the people maintaining it. Exhausted, overworked people one bad week away from quitting make your entire security posture fragile, regardless of how sophisticated the technical controls are.
To see how Admin By Request can support your team, you can download our free plan for up to 25 endpoints, or book a demo here.
