The SANS 2024 SOC Survey, a comprehensive new Torq-sponsored study, reveals that for the first time in decades, the tenure of SOC and Security Analysts is increasing. They’re choosing to remain at their posts for three-to-five years, up from an average of one-to-three years.
Modern post-SOAR hyperautomation solutions are playing a significant role in alleviating the burdens these cybersecurity pros face. Historically, they’ve been prone to severe, soul-destroying burnout related to dealing with endless manual alert processes, resulting in alert fatigue and a deluge of false positives that create constant, unnecessary fire drills that drain energy and motivation.
The report further states that staffing challenges and automation needs remain a red alert critical issue. The continued lack of skilled staff available further underlines the criticality of SOC pro retention.
SANS surveyed more than 400 cybersecurity pros from across the world, with a focus on security administrators and analysts, security managers and directors, incident responders, and threat hunters. Geographies represented include the US, Canada, Europe, South America, Asia, the Middle East, Australia/New Zealand, and Africa. The survey represents industries including financial services, banking, insurance, government, and high tech.
Save the Analyst:
Hyperautomation Drives Unprecedented Efficiency
According to the survey, the positive trend 30 percent of respondents are experiencing in retention and employee satisfaction underlines the value of new security automation solutions, such as the AI-driven Torq Hyperautomation Platform. Torq Hyperautomation automates every SOC process at scale, liberating SecOps pros from the manual threat identification and remediation grind. It collects, analyzes, and organizes unprocessed events and signals into contextually-enriched cases in real time. It then intelligently and intuitively orders them according to severity, priority, and field of ownership. Next, it auto-remediates the majority of cases across multiple organizational functions and escalates only the most critical and complex threats for human intervention.
“The positive impact Torq Hyperautomation is having on the productivity, efficiency, and job satisfaction for Citadel’s SOC team is significant,” said Moti Caro, CEO, Citadel. “With Torq Hyperautomation, the vast majority of the thousands of daily threat alerts and signals our team used to handle manually are now automatically and instantly processed, analyzed, identified, and remediated. Our SOC team is now able to place significantly more focus on proactive measures and longer-term strategic projects, with 100% confidence in how Torq Hyperautomation precisely handles threat response.”
“Torq has transformed efficiency for all five of my security teams and enabled them to focus on much more high-value strategic work, instead of manual detection and remediation tasks.” said Yossi Yeshua, CISO, Riskified. “Riskified is a ‘Torq-first’ company that’s seeking to take maximum advantage of its incredible hyperautomation capabilities at every opportunity.”
Boosting SOC Professionals’ Mental Health
The survey reflects a significant shift from January 2024, during which TechTarget assessed that, “Nearly a third of cybersecurity experts say they consider leaving the profession on an occasional (21%) or regular (9%) basis – citing stress associated with the career as the top reason. Coupled with SANS’ previous “It’s Time to Break the SOC Analyst Burnout Cycle” feature that revealed it takes seven months to two years to fill a SOC role, it becomes clear that the mental health benefits of the shift to new security automation approaches pays multiple dividends.
SANS’ findings correlate with another recent perspective on how Torq Hyperautomation alleviates SOC burnout from IDC.
“Every day, IDC is engaged with SOC professionals who communicate the existential challenges they’re facing, both in terms of keeping up with ever-escalating threat complexity and volume, and the incredible burden that places on the shoulders of their teams,” said Chris Kissel, Vice President, Security & Trust Products, IDC Research. “Torq HyperSOC is the first solution we’ve seen that effectively enables SOC professionals to mitigate issues including alert fatigue, false positives, staff burnout, and attrition. We are also impressed by how its AI augmentation capabilities empower these staff members to be much more proactive about fortifying the security perimeter.”
GET THE SURVEY
Torq is making the SANS 2024 SOC Survey available at no charge to qualified cybersecurity professionals. To submit your request for access, please fill out this form.
