Most organizations will have plenty of cybersecurity tools available by 2026, but they will lack sufficient numbers of cyber personnel to support their use; a variety of international surveys show that while the number of attacks continues to increase and regulatory pressure continues to intensify, the number of cybersecurity job openings worldwide exceeds 1 million.
The best example of this problem is an overworked single (or a pair of) IT or Security Administrator(s), expected to "own" Cybersecurity in addition to their other duties.
The shortage of crew members does not mean that there are no positions available, as many organizations without solid crews also admit to lacking deep expertise within various specialized areas of Cybersecurity (e.g., Cloud Security, Incident Response, Threat Hunting). As a direct result of skills gaps, Security Admins accumulate many unanswered alerts, dashboards remain deeply "red" with unresolved alerts, and essential responsibilities such as patching, reviewing logs and tuning policies are "on the list," but are never completed.
In fact, many Mid-Market & Small-Medium Businesses will have what they label as "Security Teams," which is essentially 2-3 members from their IT Staff trying very hard to keep up with a variety of tickets, insure all systems are operational, support User inquiries and ultimately review Security Alerts when time permits.
It is common for them to encounter the following scenarios:
A ransomware attack can occur very rapidly when ransomware groups become professionals. They can conduct supply-chain attacks on vendors as well as customers. The ability of malicious actors to discover misconfigured servers and services while using automated tools to scan the Internet is now commonplace. The result is that many organisations are now in a reactive mode because of limited resources and have adopted the practice of responding to attacks as they occur rather than reducing risk in a proactive manner.
As expectations of leadership continue to rise, Boards, regulators and cyber insurers increasingly want evidence of resilience through tested incident response plans, ongoing monitoring, regular assessments and defined accountability; simply stating that you are "short-staffed" is never going to be enough to justify weak control or slow response times.
This disconnect between what you can do with a lean, small team versus the demands from the threat landscape and regulators is the major conversation point for 2026. Some organisations still want to believe they have a full Security Operations Centre by virtue of simply owning a SIEM, while other organisations are honest about their constraints and are beginning to rethink their models, leveraging automation where they can, investing their internal time into high value activities, and leveraging partnerships for where they cannot provide continuous coverage alone.
Ultimately, organisations that adapt most successfully will have recognised early on that they cannot hire their way out of a talent shortage and have instead chosen to redesign due to their operating models by sharpening their foundational processes, choosing technology solutions that reduce the amount of noise, and willfully combining their internal core competency with external managed security solutions to mitigate the risk of a small internal security team resulting in increased probabilities of significant breaches.
At Ancrew, we help exactly these lean IT and security teams by providing 24×7 managed detection and response, SIEM/SOC operations, VAPT, and compliance‑driven security services, so that mid‑market and SMB organizations can achieve enterprise‑grade protection and regulatory‑ready visibility without needing to build a large in‑house security operations function.