In Part 1 of this series, we looked at how organizations limit testing because they’re worried they’ll create remediation backlogs they can’t close. In Part 2, we addressed the myth that frequent testing is “too expensive” and why the way testing is purchased often matters as much as the price tag itself.
Now we turn to a third challenge that arises in nearly every security strategy conversation, especially once leaders agree that testing is important and want to do more of it.
“We don’t have the people to do this properly.”
On the surface, this is undeniably true. Security testing and vulnerability management require specialized skills, which are in short supply. But underneath that truth is a more solvable problem that rarely gets named. Many organizations don’t just lack headcount; they’re relying on scarce expertise for work that should be repeatable, scalable, and shared across the team.
The reality: demand for security skills far exceeds supply
Even organizations with solid security programs struggle to hire and retain the talent required to run testing at a high cadence. The work isn’t just pressing buttons in a scanner and producing a report. Effective testing requires people who understand attack paths, not just individual findings. It requires the ability to validate exploitability, translate technical issues into business impact, and coordinate remediation across IT, DevOps, and engineering without turning every ticket into a negotiation.
That combination of technical depth and cross-functional fluency is hard to find. It’s also hard to keep up. Senior talent is expensive, the market is competitive, and even good teams lose people to burnout, better offers, or roles that feel less reactive. When the organization can’t staff consistently, testing cadence becomes fragile by default. The work slows down not because the risks went away, but because there aren’t enough people who feel confident interpreting results and pushing them through to closure.
The hidden cost of the talent gap: bottlenecks, not just vacancies
The most damaging impact of skill shortages isn’t that a role sits open on an org chart. It’s that the work gets trapped behind a few individuals.
This is where you see the real pattern that suppresses cadence. One or two senior analysts become the choke point for all testing results. Reports sit untouched because no one wants to triage them without confidence. Development and IT teams deprioritize findings they don’t fully understand, not out of malice, but because ambiguity is hard to act on when they’re already juggling competing deadlines.
Over time, leadership reaches a conclusion that sounds logical: “Until we hire more people, we can’t increase testing.”
It’s logical. It’s also often wrong.
Because what leadership is really describing is not a staffing gap. It’s a dependency model. Testing depends on specific people being available, and when they are overloaded or unavailable, cadence collapses.
The outside-the-box truth: hiring alone rarely solves the cadence problem
Here’s the uncomfortable reality that many teams learn after a hiring push: even when organizations do hire, testing cadence often doesn’t improve.
There are a few reasons for this, and they’re all predictable once you’ve lived through them. New hires take months to onboard effectively, and they often require senior staff to train them, which makes the bottleneck worse before it gets better. Senior talent is expensive and easily poached, which means stability is never guaranteed. A handful of individuals become critical dependencies, and knowledge remains siloed because there’s never enough time to document decisions, standardize workflows, and build repeatable processes.
In some organizations, there’s another layer to this that doesn’t get said out loud. Leaders delay testing because they don’t want to expose just how dependent they are on a small number of people. The program “works,” but only when the right person is available, and that’s a fragile place to be.
The result is a testing model that runs on individual heroics rather than on operational design. Testing happens when the right person has time, not when risk demands it.
Rethinking the model: skills as a service, not a headcount problem
Organizations that break this cycle stop trying to staff their way out of it. That doesn’t mean they stop hiring or stop investing in internal teams. It means they stop treating every part of testing as work that must be performed by a scarce expert sitting inside the company.
Instead, they adopt hybrid models that combine three things: automation for scale, external expertise for depth, and internal teams for context and ownership. This approach doesn’t replace internal security teams; it amplifies them.
It also changes the question from “How do we hire enough specialists to do everything?” to “How do we make sure the right level of expertise is available at the right time, without making the entire program dependent on a few people?”
Once you ask the question that way, the path forward becomes much clearer.
Practical ways to increase testing without hiring more people
The goal here is not to lower standards. It’s to build a testing motion that can survive real-world constraints. If you have limited people and limited expert time, the answer is to protect that time and use it where it matters most.
Use automation to reduce cognitive load, not just effort
Automation is often misunderstood as a replacement for people. Its greatest value is reducing decision fatigue.
If your team spends hours sorting noise, de-duplicating findings, debating ownership, and manually routing tickets, you will always feel understaffed, even with a larger team. The win is not simply faster scanning. The win is making outputs easier to interpret and easier to act on.
Effective automation filters noise, groups related findings, highlights exploitable paths, and flags repeat failures, so teams can focus on thinking rather than sorting. Even simple operational automation, like tagging assets by criticality or auto-assigning owners based on CMDB data, can improve throughput and reduce bottlenecks without adding headcount.
This is also how you make junior staff successful. When automation standardizes the “first pass” and reduces ambiguity, you don’t need every triage decision to be made by a senior expert.
Shift expert work to external specialists, selectively
Not every task requires in-house expertise. That statement can feel controversial in security because so much of the work is sensitive and context heavy. But there’s a difference between context-intensive work and expert-intensive work.
High-value candidates for external support tend to be tasks where depth matters most and doing them poorly can create false confidence. Penetration testing is a classic example, especially if your internal team is stretched thin and can’t maintain the same level of adversarial depth across multiple domains. Exploit validation, attack-path analysis, and retesting after remediation are also strong candidates, because they require specialized skills and are easier to deliver as scoped, outcomes-based work.
The key is to outsource what is expert-intensive and keep what is context-intensive internal. Internal teams are best positioned to understand business priorities, asset criticality, change constraints, and what “acceptable risk” looks like in your environment. External specialists can provide the depth and repetition needed to keep cadence consistent, without forcing you into permanent staffing commitments.
This is where models like PTaaS and co-managed testing can be useful. They create a way to access expertise on demand, scale up when risk increases, and keep testing moving even when hiring is slow.
Standardize triage and decision-making
One of the most underutilized fixes for staffing constraints is standardization.
When teams lack clear rules for what to fix first, who owns remediation, and how to communicate risk, every finding becomes a debate. And debates don’t scale.
Standardization doesn’t mean you ignore nuances. It means you define consistent decision frameworks so the team can move quickly most of the time, and reserve expert judgment for the truly complex edge cases.
Deterministic frameworks, such as risk-based prioritization, exploitability criteria, and asset criticality tiers, enable junior staff to act with confidence and reduce reliance on a handful of experts. This is also how you reduce the “single point of failure” problem. If the program depends on one person’s judgment, cadence will always be limited. If the program depends on shared rules, cadence becomes sustainable.
The key insight
The cybersecurity talent gap is real, but it’s not the primary reason organizations under-test.
The deeper issue is over-reliance on scarce expertise for tasks that should be repeatable and scalable. Organizations that increase testing cadence do not endlessly hire, burn out their best people, or centralize all knowledge in a few heads. They automate the routine, externalize the specialized, and standardize the decisions.
When skills are treated as a shared service rather than a bottleneck, testing cadence becomes something you can maintain, not something you attempt when the calendar is clear, and the right person is available.
Coming up next in this series
In the next post, we’re going to talk about noise and context, and why too many “critical” findings can quietly kill a testing program. If you’ve ever looked at a report and thought, “I believe you, but I have no idea where to start,” you already know the feeling. We’ll unpack why this happens, how it creates decision paralysis, and what teams do differently when they want results that lead to action instead of fatigue.