Every IT team hits a breaking point. The tickets keep piling up, strategic projects are put on hold again and staff who once thrived are now running on fumes. Dismissing it as a temporary crunch or just part of the job is tempting, but often, it’s the early warning sign of something far more serious: burnout.
In the UK, burnout has reached record levels. Reports of employee burnout surged by 48% in 2023, according to Neuroworx. At the same time, 37% of UK workers reported experiencing poor mental health, almost double the rate of the previous year, according to Breathing Space HR. These aren’t abstract statistics. They reflect what’s happening on the ground, especially in IT teams already under pressure.
For business, the risks are real. Overloaded teams stall progress, innovation slows to a crawl and security posture weakens. And when nothing changes, high performers walk, taking critical knowledge with them.
This article looks at how burnout manifests inside internal IT teams, the operational and financial costs that follow and why co-managed support is becoming a practical solution to reduce the pressure, without giving up control.
Burnout doesn’t start with total failure; it starts with corners being cut. It’s missed updates, last-minute fixes and the gradual retreat of focus from long-term strategy to short-term survival. While the signs aren’t always obvious in reporting dashboards, the downstream impact becomes increasingly hard to ignore.
When workloads exceed capacity for too long, productivity doesn’t just plateau, it breaks down. You see this not in volume, but in volatility.
Support tickets that were once resolved within hours now take days and your teams operate in reaction mode, with little time left for structured improvements. Maintenance gets deprioritised and security patching windows are missed. Documentation is pushed aside until “later”, a later that never comes.
This behaviour often masks a deeper problem: emotional exhaustion. And it’s accelerating. According to theHRDIRECTOR, 50% of cyber security professionals now expect to burn out within the next year. The consequences go beyond output. Burnt-out staff are less likely to challenge poor decisions, flag emerging risks, or support change, creating silent friction that slows everything down.
In the UK, the pressure is particularly acute. TechRadar reports that nearly a third of security leaders have already reached a stage of severe burnout, with many more on the brink. These are the people tasked with defending systems, enabling digital change and supporting hundreds of users and they’re being pushed to the breaking point.
Traditional performance metrics rarely show the real picture. A healthy SLA or uptime percentage may suggest everything is fine, even as internal delivery slows to a crawl. The real signs live in the backlog: the strategic initiatives left idle, the migration plans that never start and the legacy systems nobody has time to decommission.
This hidden workload is dangerous, not just for morale but for operational resilience. Technical debt accumulates in silence, poorly configured tools remain in place and a process that should take 30 minutes starts taking 3 hours, every time.
These aren’t dramatic failures but slow decreases in efficiency that drain resources without triggering alarms.
And the psychological toll is compounding the operational strain.
UK teams are now facing sustained cognitive overload, especially in cyber roles. CSO Online reports that more than half of cyber security teams are overwhelmed by the volume of low-value alerts, a workload that crowds out higher-priority investigations. Meanwhile, Cyber Magazine reveals that 30% of cyber professionals are already experiencing active burnout.
Not “at risk” of burning out but actively burnt out.
That means critical risks may already be going unchallenged.
These signs don’t show up on dashboards - they’re felt across the business: in missed deadlines, poor user experiences and reactive firefighting that never ends.
Burnout isn’t just a people problem, it’s an operational liability. When internal IT teams are consistently over capacity, the effects ripple far beyond the tech department. And the cumulative cost, both financial and strategic, can quietly destabilise the entire organisation.
An overburdened IT function may still maintain the essentials, like keeping systems online or handling basic support, but it loses the bandwidth to move the business forward. Strategic initiatives get delayed or dropped altogether. Internal improvement projects like automation, cost optimisation, or cloud modernisation sit untouched because there's simply no one to lead them.
This lack of capacity creates stagnation. Rather than evolving infrastructure to meet growing business demands, teams remain stuck in “keeping the lights on” mode. The result is missed opportunities to enhance efficiency and gain a competitive advantage.
And, by the time there’s space to act, the market may have already moved on.
And while the operational output slows, the internal cost climbs. A 2023 study from MHFA England confirms that burnout and stress are now running rampant across UK workplaces.
The effects aren’t limited to individual well-being; they directly undermine business performance. According to Deloitte, poor mental health now costs UK employers £51 billion annually, driven by reduced productivity, absenteeism and presenteeism.
One of the most damaging consequences of prolonged burnout is attrition, not just of any staff, but of the most capable, knowledgeable individuals. High performers are the first to absorb the load when resources are stretched. They’re also the first to leave when the workload becomes unsustainable.
Losing key team members is expensive. The average costs of replacing a skilled employee range from 75% to 200% of their annual salary, depending on their role and experience. This includes recruitment, onboarding, training time and the productivity dip that comes with getting a new hire up to speed.
And it’s happening more frequently. The UK’s average employee turnover rate now sits at 35%, with projected increases ahead. For IT teams with niche system knowledge or compliance-sensitive environments, this churn introduces operational risk. It creates gaps in documentation, slows incident response and often results in a rushed redistribution of duties, putting even more pressure on those who remain.
Worse still, those who don’t leave may disengage. Burnout lowers morale, reduces initiative and fuels a culture of defensiveness and blame. These are conditions where mistakes happen and accountability becomes scarce.
Nowhere is the impact of burnout more dangerous than in cyber security. As pressure increases, response times stretch, alerts are missed, logs go unreviewed and tools fall out of sync with policy.
The volume of work may appear steady but the quality quietly deteriorates.
According to digit.fyi, 76% of technology teams report experiencing burnout directly due to their role in managing cyber risk. A further 24% cite under-resourcing as a primary contributor to ongoing stress. This signals that coverage gaps may already exist.
This is where compliance frameworks can give a false sense of security. On paper, the organisation may be aligned with ISO 27001 or Cyber Essentials. But if key monitoring tasks are behind, or if remediation work is left half-done, the business becomes exposed. Audits don’t catch everything and attackers don’t wait for the next review cycle.
Burnout doesn’t just lower performance, it raises risk. And the longer it goes unaddressed, the harder it becomes to fix without disruption.
At first glance, the answer to burnout seems obvious: expand the team. More people, less pressure. But in practice, hiring doesn’t fix the root cause of burnout it just delays it. Recruitment is costly, unpredictable and often mismatched to the real problem: a lack of bandwidth, not a lack of skill.
Burnout is a pressure that builds over weeks not months, but recruitment is a process measured in quarters. From drafting the job description to onboarding the right candidate, the average hiring cycle for IT roles stretches well beyond 60 days—and that’s if everything goes to plan.
Now layer in market volatility.
In 2023, the UK faced one of the most competitive IT job markets in recent memory, with a sharp increase in unfilled technical roles and fierce competition for cyber talent. Even mid-level roles are difficult to staff. And, as job postings remain open, the strain on current staff increases, leading to even faster decline in output, motivation and wellbeing.
So, while the hiring process ticks along, burnout accelerates. Capacity doesn’t return and the damage often gets worse before help arrives.
The numbers don’t balance out, even for organisations investing heavily in talent.
According to Business Mole, UK turnover rates hit 35.6% in 2023, one of the highest on record. And, much of this attrition is concentrated in knowledge-intensive roles like IT and cyber security, where stress and unsustainable workload are leading drivers of departure.
Hiring doesn’t protect against this churn. In many cases, it amplifies it. Existing team members are asked to cover additional ground while onboarding new hires, handing over complex projects, or rewriting documentation under pressure. The result? More burnout. More exits. And more instability - just when consistency matters most.
In short, if a business is losing team members faster than it can replace them, then hiring isn’t a solution.
Not every capacity issue justifies a permanent hire. Some are temporary, like a security audit, a software migration, or a user onboarding surge. Others require highly specialised skills that would sit idle outside of project work. In these cases, hiring full-time roles leads to inefficient spending or underutilised expertise.
For example, a mid-market business might only need advanced threat analysis once per quarter, or endpoint compliance reporting ahead of a regulator submission. Building that into the core team makes little commercial sense, yet outsourcing it entirely risks losing oversight. This is the gap where traditional resourcing models fail.
The real problem isn’t always the number of staff. It’s the mismatch between workload and available hours, between critical needs and available skill sets. And, when those mismatches go unaddressed, they compound over time and increase stress, delays and costs.
Perhaps most importantly, burnout isn’t caused by too few people alone. It’s caused by misaligned priorities, inadequate systems and a lack of mechanisms to manage the pressure.
Simply adding more team members doesn’t fix the underlying constraints. It adds complexity, management overhead and, if expectations aren’t recalibrated, more stress.
That’s why many organisations that increase headcount still see a performance dip. Without clear task separation, defined escalation paths and load-balancing mechanisms, the team continues to operate in reactive mode. And burnout returns regardless of team size.
Solving burnout requires more than recruitment. It requires structural relief: the ability to offload day-to-day workload while retaining control over tools, strategy and decisions.
That’s where smart outsourcing models come in, not as a replacement, but as a pressure valve.
Relieving burnout doesn’t have to mean rebuilding your IT department or handing over core operations. What most businesses need isn’t a bigger team - it’s a more adaptable one. A team that can absorb short-term surges, manage repetitive workloads and support specialist needs without disrupting internal roles or decision-making authority.
This is where Co-Managed or Hybrid models can add value. It’s not outsourcing in the traditional sense, but more of a structured partnership, one that gives your internal team room to breathe while retaining oversight, governance and strategic direction.
Co-managed support is designed for businesses with internal IT capabilities but a need for additional capacity and expertise. It’s a model that separates ownership from execution, allowing internal teams to remain in control while external specialists handle day-to-day workload.
That includes:
These aren’t tasks your team can’t do, they’re tasks your team shouldn’t have to carry alone when priorities like infrastructure projects, automation, or security planning are at stake.
In this model, the business retains:
That makes it different from fully managed outsourcing models, where visibility and responsiveness often disappear over time.
The goal of co-managed support isn’t to take over. It’s to restore balance by giving internal teams the support they need to focus on higher-value work, without losing their role in setting direction.
One of the biggest myths about outsourcing is that it replaces internal leadership. With co-managed IT, the opposite is true. Internal stakeholders continue to lead on architecture, vendor decisions, security policy and transformation planning.
The external partner provides the “muscle” to get it done faster, more consistently and without overloading internal resources.
This model thrives on collaboration.
As Mansys explains, “co-managed services rely on a symbiotic rapport between internal IT and the external provider.” The provider adapts to your internal environment, not the other way around. They work within your toolsets, support frameworks and operational context, without introducing new complexity.
That means your team remains the decision-making centre, while the partner becomes an extension of your capability. For example:
As Chris Kopec notes in this LinkedIn article, “co-managed support enables SMEs to tailor the partnership to their exact needs,” whether that involves stabilising operations, accelerating recovery, or freeing time for innovation.
This results in a strategic shift that allows internal teams to regain focus, reduce burnout and deliver long-term business value.
Today’s Managed Service models don’t just add people, they add intelligence. Many of the most effective services now integrate AI-driven tools to support faster alert triage, policy-aligned automation and real-time reporting.
This means less time firefighting and more time focusing on what needs human attention. Rather than adding complexity, AI surfaces risks earlier, reduces noise and brings clarity to the workload, so your internal team remains in control of priorities and outcomes.
When pressure is constant, even the most capable teams fall into reactive patterns. But when the load is rebalanced, when the noise is removed and capacity is restored, teams can shift back to what they’re meant to do: lead, improve and deliver outcomes that matter.
Co-managed IT support isn’t about doing less, it’s about doing the right things. And when internal teams regain that clarity, the results are measurable.
One of the first benefits of restoring internal bandwidth is momentum. Projects that have been stuck in planning finally move into implementation. Infrastructure upgrades that were repeatedly deferred get prioritised. Automation opportunities, long flagged but never acted on, start to reduce manual overhead.
Internal teams can refocus on priority work when the repetitive support tasks are shared. That might include migrating to cloud platforms, rationalising legacy systems, improving compliance alignment, or developing smarter data management strategies. These initiatives drive long-term business growth and only happen when your key people aren’t buried in reactive tickets.
Burnout drives attrition, but the opposite is also true: meaningful, manageable workloads help teams stay. When people can see progress in their work and when they aren’t constantly firefighting, they’re more engaged, invested and more likely to grow within the business.
This shift pays dividends. Retaining experienced staff protects institutional knowledge, accelerates delivery and reduces recruitment costs. And, when internal teams are supported instead of replaced, morale improves. The partnership becomes something they rely on and not something they resist.
The financial impact is clear. According to Deloitte, for every £1 invested in mental health and wellbeing, employers see an average return of £4.70 in improved productivity and reduced absence.
Creating space for your team isn’t a soft benefit; it’s a bottom-line one.
With time back, your team can focus on risk areas that rarely get full attention: patch management, configuration drift, dormant accounts, or under-monitored cloud platforms.
More importantly, your staff can re-engage with your business’s evolving needs. That means better alignment between IT capabilities and commercial priorities, faster support for new service rollouts, improved responsiveness to end-user feedback and greater clarity in reporting to stakeholders or the board.
The goal isn’t just to survive the pressure, it’s to regain the oversight and direction that makes IT strategic. AI-powered Managed Services play a critical role here.
From anomaly detection and ticket pattern recognition to automated reporting and predictive insights, AI helps elevate visibility across your IT environment without increasing headcount. Your team gets the signal without the noise and the ability to act on what matters.
Burnout makes teams reactive. This makes them strategic.
When IT teams are stretched beyond capacity, visibility suffers, risk signals get lost in the noise and strategic priorities stall. What looks like resilience on the surface is often unsustainable underneath, held together by manual effort and good intentions.
This isn’t just an operational issue. It’s a leadership one.
Adding more people may help temporarily, but the real solution lies in creating structure, not strain. The support of an MSP gives your team the bandwidth to refocus, without losing control of the tools, priorities or outcomes that matter.
And when AI is part of that partnership, you’re not just reducing pressure - you’re gaining oversight. From intelligent alerting to real-time reporting, AI-enhanced services bring clarity to what’s happening, what’s slipping and what needs attention, without adding to your team’s mental load.
Aztech’s co-managed services are built for businesses that want more visibility, not more guesswork and more support, without giving up strategic direction.
If your team is already carrying too much, don’t wait for the breaking point.
Aztech offers a free, no-obligation IT Health Check to help you identify pressure points, clarify internal priorities and map out what Managed Services could look like for your business.
Because true control isn’t about doing everything yourself. It’s about knowing what’s being done, why, and where your focus makes the biggest impact.