Beat the Skills Gap with Automated Identity Security
The Skills Gap is an Identity Problem. Stop Trying to Hire Your Way Out of It.
Your team can't watch every privileged session, but AI can. Here’s how to secure vendor and internal access with Just-in-Time (JIT) elevation.
Source: Trescudo Intelligence • Author: Evangeline Smith, MarCom • September 30, 2025
The headlines are relentless. For years, we’ve been warned about the widening cybersecurity skills gap, and the latest 2025 figures paint a stark picture. The most recent (ISC)² Cybersecurity Workforce Study reports a global shortage of over 4 million cybersecurity professionals. In Europe, a staggering 68% of organisations report that this shortage puts them at moderate or extreme risk of a cyber attack.
For leaders in critical infrastructure—healthcare, aviation, transport—this isn't just an HR problem. It’s an operational crisis. You can’t find the people, and the teams you have are overworked, burnt out, and facing an ever-expanding attack surface.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can't hire your way out of this problem. The issue is no longer just about finding more people; it's that the scale of the threat has surpassed human capacity for manual oversight. The skills gap's most dangerous symptom is an unmanageable identity and access landscape.
The Overwhelming Reality: Where the Skills Gap Hits Hardest
A skeleton crew can't possibly manage the sheer volume of identities in a modern enterprise. Consider the explosion of access points:
Cloud consoles and workloads
Third-party vendors and contractors needing temporary access
Legacy OT systems in a hospital or airport
CI/CD pipelines with service accounts and API keys
An ever-growing list of SaaS applications
Your security team is expected to grant, monitor, and revoke access for all of these, all the time. The most critical of these are privileged accounts—the "keys to the kingdom." Manually monitoring every privileged session is impossible. Granting permanent, standing privileges because it’s "easier" is a catastrophic risk waiting to happen. This is the daily reality where the skills gap becomes a clear and present danger.
The Trescudo Solution: A Paradigm Shift from People to Process
If we can’t add more people, we must create a more intelligent and automated process. The solution lies in embracing a Zero Trust philosophy of Least Privilege Access, enforced by modern technology. This is how we secure your operations without needing an army of analysts.
1. Eliminate Standing Privileges with Just-in-Time (JIT) Elevation
Instead of giving administrators and vendors permanent privileged access, JIT grants temporary, session-based elevation on an as-needed basis.
Before: A vendor has 24/7 admin access to your network, even though they only need it for two hours a week. Their credentials are a constant, high-value target.
With JIT: The vendor requests access. Their identity is verified, and they are granted specific permissions only for the systems they need, for a limited time. When the session ends, the access evaporates.
This dramatically reduces your attack surface. Trescudo achieves this through our partnership with:
Segura, a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for Privileged Access Management (PAM). Their platform provides robust controls for PAM, JIT elevation, VPN-less vendor access, and full session recording for audit and compliance.
2. Augment Human Oversight with Agentic AI
With JIT in place, the next challenge is monitoring those temporary sessions for anomalous behaviour. This is where your overworked team gets the support it needs. Instead of manually reviewing logs, an AI-powered engine does it for them.
Agentic AI and Hyperautomation services act as a force multiplier for your team4. By integrating AI-powered threat analysis, we can identify suspicious patterns and provide predictive insights, reducing analyst workload by up to 35%. For identity, this means:
Automatically flagging a user accessing a critical system outside of normal hours.
Detecting impossible travel scenarios (e.g., logging in from two countries at once).
Containing a threat by automatically revoking a session if malicious activity is detected.
For your customer-facing identity needs, we partner with:
VU Security to prevent fraud and protect digital trust with advanced biometrics, adaptive multi-factor authentication (MFA), and bot defence.
Key Takeaways: Practical Steps to Take This Week
Shifting your strategy can feel daunting, but you can start today.
Identify Your Privileged Accounts: Run an audit of all accounts with administrative privileges. Who has them? Are they permanent? Start with your top 5 most critical systems.
Map Your Vendor Access: Document every third-party vendor that has access to your network. This is often a significant blind spot and a key compliance requirement under NIS2.
Start the JIT Conversation: You don't have to boil the ocean. Identify one high-risk area (like a critical third-party vendor) and model how a JIT workflow would improve its security.
Review Your Monitoring Capabilities: Be honest—could you detect a rogue administrator in real time today? If the answer is "no" or "maybe," you have an AI-shaped gap in your defence.
The Trescudo Advantage: Technology and Expertise Combined
Implementing these solutions requires both leading technology and deep expertise. As a value-added reseller and expert consultancy, Trescudo provides both. Our Healthcare Patient-safety and Aviation Incident Response bundles are pre-integrated stacks designed to solve these exact challenges, aligning controls to NIS2, HIPAA, and GDPR.
The skills gap is real, but it doesn't have to be a fatal flaw in your defence. By shifting focus from a manual, people-centric model to an automated, process-driven one, you can build a more resilient and manageable security posture.
Ready to see how this applies to your environment? Schedule your complimentary 48-Hour Rapid Readiness assessment and let our experts show you how to close your identity security gaps.
Schedule Your Cyber Resilience Session Today