Cybersecurity teams are shrinking, with nearly half of UK businesses (46%) relying on just one individual to oversee their cybersecurity. In the public sector, team sizes average three, while private sector teams are typically limited to just two members. This level of staffing illustrates how stretched security resources have become, where limited personnel means lean teams face ongoing challenges in securing their organisation’s defences.
Fortunately, leaner teams don’t have to mean weaker security. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are helping businesses streamline threat detection and response, reduce alert fatigue, cut costs, and enable cybersecurity professionals to shift their focus from reactive responses to strategic initiatives, moving away from false alarms and manual processes.
AI in cybersecurity works by collecting and analysing data from various points across an organisation’s network – from system logs to network traffic – to automatically identify unusual patterns that may indicate a threat. Through continuous learning, AI can discern between regular and anomalous behaviours, such as outbound data traffic or unexpected login attempts. This automated detection is especially valuable for lean IT teams, helping them overcome three major hurdles in cybersecurity: time, visibility, and expertise.
Time: Moving from reactive to proactive
Due to the limited time lean teams have, they often operate reactively. When an issue arises, a ticket is logged, requiring immediate attention from the cybersecurity professional. This focus on immediate needs leaves little time for proactive security measures like patch management, user training, and device hardening.
One of AI’s strengths is its ability to drastically reduce false positives by learning an organisation’s “normal” behaviour patterns. This significantly cuts down on the volume of alerts that require manual investigation, saving significant amounts of time. For instance, AI can quickly differentiate between a command-and-control attempt and an employee streaming a sports event from overseas. By filtering out such false alarms, AI enables lean teams to dedicate their limited resources to genuine threats and long-term security improvements.
Visibility: Breaking down data silos
Most organisations still rely on siloed security tools, which limits visibility and makes life difficult for lean teams, especially those without dedicated security engineering resources. When security staff want to improve network visibility, they often face configuration challenges that make achieving comprehensive oversight complex and time-consuming.
AI-driven security solutions help by consolidating and filtering security data, giving teams a unified, coherent view of their network. This “single pane of glass” approach not only provides detailed insights into potential threats but also eliminates the need for expensive, specialised tools for each function. By simplifying data presentation and reducing the number of tools in use, AI enhances visibility, allowing teams to better monitor their environments without additional complexity.
Skills: Filling the expertise gap
With cybersecurity skills in short supply, many lean teams struggle to find the expertise needed to improve their organisation’s security posture. In fact, 70% of IT and cybersecurity decision-makers say that the skills shortage increases risks to their organisations.
AI offers a way to bridge this skills gap by performing expert-level analysis on vast amounts of data and identifying patterns that suggest genuine threats. When threats are detected, AI can automatically isolate compromised endpoints, terminate malicious processes, and organise data within established frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK for easier reporting. This automation can cut the mean response time to under 10 minutes, enabling staff to respond to incidents without the need for additional hires or extensive expertise. In essence, AI equips lean teams with advanced threat detection and response capabilities that would otherwise require a much larger, highly skilled workforce.
Enterprise-level AI benefits
In many organisations, lean security teams must manage increasingly complex security environments. AI presents a unique opportunity for these teams to achieve enterprise-level protection without the need for a large-scale infrastructure or expanded workforce. However, for AI to reach its full potential, access to high-quality, consolidated data is essential.
If the data AI relies on is fragmented across multiple tools or not designed for AI analysis, it can struggle to deliver accurate results. Solutions that aggregate data from endpoints, cloud workloads, and network traffic into a single, cohesive format offer a distinct advantage, enabling AI to more accurately detect and respond to threats.
By using AI-based tools that unify data effectively, security teams can automate threat detection and response, significantly reducing the time and manual effort required. AI empowers lean teams to operate with the sophistication and efficiency of larger, resource-intensive operations by providing advanced capabilities that would otherwise be out of reach.
With AI as an enabler, lean cybersecurity teams can rise to the challenge, turning limited resources into a powerful defence strategy. Through the power of automation, advanced analytics, and streamlined processes, AI is helping lean teams do more with less, bringing them closer to the goal of resilient, proactive cybersecurity.
About the Author
David Atkinson is the Founder and CEO of SenseOn. He has over fifteen years’ experience working within the UK’s specialist military units and Government environments where his close work with CISOs enabled him to identify flaws with current cyber defence approaches, highlighting the need for a new technology to deal with the increasing velocity of cyber-attacks.
David can be reached online at LinkedIn and at our company website https://www.senseon.io/
