Nearly seven in ten CISOs are open to making a career move within the next year — and some want out of cybersecurity entirely. That’s the headline finding from the latest IANS Research and Artico Search report, as covered today by CSO Online. But behind that number is a more troubling reality: CISO burnout has reached a tipping point, and the people responsible for defending our organizations aren’t being chased away by adversaries. They’re being ground down by the job itself.
As Erik Avakian of Info-Tech Research Group told CSO, this isn’t about chasing better titles. It’s about “sheer exhaustion, organizational misalignment, and a growing sense that the job, as it is currently structured in many organizations, is not sustainable.”
That should alarm every board, every CEO, and every security vendor in the industry — including us.
CISO burnout is real…and the burden is expanding faster than the budget
The CISO role has become a study in contradictions. Accountability keeps rising while authority stays flat. Scope keeps expanding while headcount stays lean. Personal liability — accelerated by SEC enforcement actions — now follows security leaders home at night. And when something goes wrong, the CISO is the one standing in front of the board explaining what happened, often without having had the budget or organizational support to prevent it in the first place.
It’s no surprise, then, that CISO burnout has become the norm rather than the exception. The pattern is unmistakable: security leaders are absorbing more risk, more complexity, and more blame than the role was ever designed to carry.
A major contributor is the ever-growing tool stack. Most enterprise security teams are now managing dozens of products that were acquired piecemeal over years — each one solving a real problem at the time, but collectively creating an operational tax that compounds with every addition. New dashboard. New integration point. New learning curve. New line item to justify. The Wiz 2026 CISO Budget Benchmark found that 58% of organizations now run more than 25 security tools, and the industry’s growing push toward consolidation tells you everything you need to know about where this is heading. CISOs aren’t asking for more tools. They’re drowning in the ones they already have.
That complexity doesn’t just slow down security operations — it fuels the CISO burnout cycle that’s pushing security leaders toward the exit.
Reducing attack surface without expanding the burden
So what’s the answer? It’s not another tool. It’s not another framework. It’s a fundamental shift in how we think about security architecture.
CISOs need to ruthlessly prioritize consolidation over accumulation. That means evaluating every element of the security stack not just on capability, but on operational cost — the human cost of maintaining it. A solution that covers a critical attack vector but requires a dedicated engineer to manage, tune, and integrate may actually be making the organization less secure by stretching an already thin team thinner.
Here’s where we’d encourage security leaders to focus:
- Collapse overlapping capabilities. Identity, network access, and endpoint trust don’t need to live in three separate platforms with three separate policy engines. When these functions converge, CISOs eliminate integration gaps that attackers exploit and reduce the operational burden on their teams simultaneously. The IBM and Palo Alto Networks study found that organizations using consolidated security platforms generate four times greater ROI than those managing fragmented stacks.
- Eliminate credentials wherever possible. Stolen credentials remain the most common initial attack vector. Every password, certificate, or shared secret that exists in your environment is a liability. Moving toward credential-free access — whether through certificate-based authentication, hardware-bound identity, or continuous trust validation — shrinks the attack surface without adding a single tool or a single task to anyone’s plate.
- Automate policy enforcement, not just detection. Too many security architectures are built around alerting humans to problems rather than preventing them automatically. When zero trust principles are enforced continuously and programmatically — not just monitored — CISOs can shift from reactive firefighting to strategic leadership. That’s not just better security; it’s a more sustainable career.
- Make security measurable in business terms. The CSO Online article noted that CISOs feel like they’re “operating on an island” and getting scapegoated when things go wrong. The antidote is translating security posture into language the board understands: risk reduction over time, compliance coverage percentages, and cost-per-incident trends. CISOs who can quantify their program’s impact are better positioned to secure budget, authority, and — critically — organizational support.
CISO burnout is an industry problem, not a personnel problem
It would be easy to frame the CISO exodus as a talent retention challenge. But that misses the point. When 69% of an entire executive function is ready to leave, the role itself needs to be redesigned — and the tools, vendors, and architectures that define it need to evolve accordingly. CISO burnout won’t be solved by wellness programs or retention bonuses. It’ll be solved by making the job structurally sustainable.
As an industry, we owe CISOs more than another point solution and a pitch deck. We owe them simplicity. We owe them consolidation. We owe them security architectures that shrink their burden instead of expanding it.
The CISOs who stay will be the ones whose organizations — and whose vendors — take that seriously.