The Talent Shortage That Is Reshaping Cybersecurity Operations
The global cybersecurity workforce gap reached 4 million unfilled positions in 2024, according to the (ISC)² Cybersecurity Workforce Study. In the United States alone, approximately 265,000 cybersecurity roles remain open. This shortage drives compensation sharply upward—the median salary for a cybersecurity analyst in the U.S. now exceeds $112,000 per year, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For cybersecurity services companies—managed security service providers (MSSPs), penetration testing firms, incident response teams, and compliance consultancies—this creates an acute problem. Every hour a highly compensated analyst spends on administrative work is an hour not spent on the threat intelligence, assessment, and response work that clients are actually paying for.
Virtual assistants are emerging as a practical solution to this misalignment, handling the operational and administrative support layer that surrounds security work without touching the technical functions that require specialized expertise.
Where VAs Fit in a Cybersecurity Services Firm
It is important to be precise about what VAs do—and do not—handle in this context. VAs are not security analysts and should not be involved in threat detection, vulnerability assessment, or incident response. What they handle is the support infrastructure around those functions:
Client Communication and Account Management. VAs respond to routine client inquiries, schedule quarterly review meetings, send engagement updates, and manage the client inbox for non-technical requests. Keeping clients informed and responsive builds trust without pulling analysts off active engagements.
Report Preparation and Formatting. Cybersecurity assessments and penetration tests generate detailed reports that must be formatted, proofread, and packaged for delivery. VAs take analyst findings and produce professionally formatted client deliverables, reducing the time analysts spend on document production.
Compliance Documentation Support. Many cybersecurity clients require ongoing documentation for frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and NIST. VAs assist with evidence collection, document organization, and deadline tracking—support work that keeps compliance engagements moving without consuming analyst hours.
Vendor and Tool License Management. Security teams use dozens of tools, each with subscription renewal dates, license counts, and provisioning requirements. VAs track tool inventories, flag renewals, and coordinate procurement documentation.
Sales and Proposal Support. VAs assist business development by researching prospective client profiles, formatting RFP responses, preparing capability presentations, and scheduling discovery calls. This frees account managers to focus on relationship-building rather than document production.
The Revenue Math
A senior cybersecurity consultant at an MSSP typically bills at $150–$300 per hour. When that consultant spends 8 hours per week on administrative tasks—report formatting, client email, scheduling, documentation—the firm is effectively converting $1,200–$2,400 per week of potential billable capacity into overhead.
At $20 per hour for a skilled VA, the same 8 hours costs $160 per week. The net recovery in billable capacity is $1,040–$2,240 per week per consultant—more than $50,000 per year, per technical employee, in recovered revenue potential.
A 2024 CompTIA study found that technology services firms that used administrative support staff or VAs to separate technical work from operational support achieved 19% higher revenue per technical employee than those that did not.
Managing Confidentiality in Cybersecurity VA Relationships
The most common concern security firms raise about VA support is data handling. This is a legitimate consideration. Reputable VA providers address it through standard NDAs, data access restrictions, and documented handling protocols. VAs in cybersecurity support roles typically work only with client-facing documents and communications—never with raw vulnerability data, network diagrams, or incident artifacts.
Structuring the VA role carefully from the outset—with clear boundaries on what information the VA can access and what channels they use—resolves most confidentiality concerns. Many security firms run successful VA programs with no meaningful data security incidents over multi-year engagements.
For cybersecurity companies looking to maximize analyst productivity and reduce administrative drag, Stealth Agents provides VAs experienced in professional services support, technical documentation, and confidentiality-forward client management.
Sources
- (ISC)², Cybersecurity Workforce Study, 2024
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Information Security Analyst Wage Data, 2024
- CompTIA, Technology Services Firm Benchmarking Report, 2024
- Cybersecurity Ventures, MSSP Market Analysis, 2024