Security teams are being prevented from doing their best work.
While understaffing and low budgets have always been challenges for any type of team, security teams are uniquely affected by repetitive, manual tasks, which in turn keep them from working on higher-impact projects that contribute to their organization’s overall security posture.
In my fifteen years of being a security practitioner, working on incident response and leading security teams, I witnessed over and over again that in the SOC, there's too much work and not enough staff. More specifically, I saw overworked analysts so consumed with tedious, repetitive tasks that it led not only to burnout, but to human error that could cost a company millions.
The analysts I worked with weren’t the only ones facing these challenges, and I wasn’t the only security leader trying to find solutions to help my team do their best work.
While we generally know the day-to-day struggles analysts face, there’s a lack of current data to give us a clear picture of what it’s like to be an analyst today. So we conducted a survey that aimed to understand them better: “Voice of the SOC Analyst.”
We found that while SOC teams are passionate and engaged in what they do, they’re challenged with endless manual tasks, understaffed teams, inefficient processes, and too many alerts — all preventing them from doing more high-quality work.
Our goal with this project is to help security leaders recognize what they can do to streamline their processes, decrease burnout, increase retention, and create better overall work environments for their analysts.
We hope you utilize these findings and data as you make your way through 2022.
