Empower Your Team with Collective Cybersecurity Knowledge
A company’s security is a team effort and should be the entire organization's responsibility, not just the Security Operations Center (SOC). For companies to set up their SOC team for success, they must equip them with the right tools. As the threat of cybersecurity breaches grows, organizations must support and empower their SOC teams with collective cybersecurity knowledge, and AI-Assisted Cybersecurity can achieve that.
Organizational Support in Cybersecurity
The majority of employees don’t have a complete understanding of the best cybersecurity practices, meaning they may be exposing their organization to more risks - and creating more work for the SOC team. Each time a new threat or alert arises, someone in SOC must stop what they’re doing to address it. If this happens regularly, it makes it hard for them to get anything done, which can contribute to alert fatigue and eventually even burnout.
Unfortunately, 50% of a SOC team’s day is spent managing security alerts. On average, analysts see over 11,000 alerts a day. Suppose many alerts are managed manually, as is the case in many organizations. In that case, SOC team members are dealing with thousands of alerts each day - 30% of which are false positives. With so much lost time and effort devoted to false positives, SOC hardly has any time to focus on the value-add projects that improve their security posture.
Without the proper tools and support, everything falls on the shoulders of the security operations team, leaving them overworked and feeling undervalued. Consequently, many alerts get ignored, significantly increasing the likelihood of a breach.
According to research by Forrester, SOC teams ignore 28% of security alerts, even with security solutions in place. The SOC team can hardly be blamed for this, as most today lack the time, resources, or employees to investigate each alert. According to the Ernst & Young Global Information Security Survey released in 2021, COVID-19 had detrimental effects on cybersecurity, as 81% of executives claimed to bypass cybersecurity processes due to the pandemic.
While adding members to your SOC team can help disperse some of this workload, it doesn’t solve the main problem. No matter how large your team, there are still thousands of alerts to sort through manually, and onboarding more experts is only a temporary solution to alleviate your overworked and underappreciated security teams. To truly empower your SOC team, organizations need to supply them with the right tools - and AI-Assisted Cybersecurity is the answer.
Support Through AI
Many organizations have tried to resolve alert fatigue in their SOC teams by implementing smart detection, but unfortunately, that creates a new issue. While this technology is beneficial in identifying risks, it ultimately creates more alerts for SOC to sort through, only increasing their workload and fatigue. As SOC teams already spend much of their time triaging alerts, adding more alerts to the queue could be detrimental.
Fortunately, AI-Assisted Cybersecurity can cut through the noise of constant alerts - no matter the volume - and automate the alert handling process. The software will identify any false positives or low-priority alerts, significantly reducing the number of alerts to be addressed. As a result, organizations can improve accuracy and response time to incidents through automation and drastically reduce alert fatigue in their IT teams.
With Deep Learning, AI-Assisted Cybersecurity can free up time for a company’s IT and SOC teams to address real threats and focus on improving security within their organization - not just maintaining it. Instead of triaging thousands of alerts, the SOC team can integrate new solutions and focus on more pressing security risks.
By automating cybersecurity processes such as alert handling, companies can alleviate them from the SOC team, allowing employees to focus on more worthwhile projects. Consequently, SOC team members will feel more productive in their work, empowering them to continue strengthening the organization’s security. With the support of automation allowing the SOC team to make more meaningful contributions, organizations can drastically improve employee satisfaction and thus employee retention.
AI-Assisted Cybersecurity takes a hybrid approach where analysts and machines work together to improve security operations. As the solution assists security analysts in the decision-making process, it learns and adapts, ultimately accelerating and improving the decisions they make. Furthermore, security automation solutions such as this can automate post-decision automation of tasks such as ticket creation, notifications, and SOAR playbook triggering.
AI-Assisted Cybersecurity can also help SOC teams to leverage their own skills by aggregating and scaling their knowledge. While Deep Learning solutions are constantly learning from themselves and developing, they need the foundation of a qualified SOC to start. Once this foundational knowledge is input, the technology can vastly improve. As such, it can learn and adapt to the particularities of the ecosystem in which it runs, ensuring that it is compatible with an organization’s unique infrastructure.
As companies worldwide are struggling to retain their workforce during a labor shortage, supporting a team as valuable as SOC is critical - and AI-Assisted Cybersecurity makes that possible. Especially for organizations with an already limited workforce, security automation is necessary to support your IT and SOC teams and improve the speed and effectiveness of security. AI-Assisted Cybersecurity allows organizations to leave tedious and repetitive tasks to the technology, while the individuals hired to drive security forwards can do precisely that.
Empowerment with Enhanced Cybersecurity
There is no question that companies can drastically improve their cybersecurity practices with automation tools - improving speed, accuracy, and overall organizational security. But, even beyond the capabilities that AI-Assisted Cybersecurity provides, this solution also has the potential to empower your SOC teams.
As automated tasks occur in the background, the SOC team will have the time, energy, and motivation to improve security posture. Plus, with the support of AI-Assisted Cybersecurity, the SOC team will have accurate data to support them in decision-making and automate the actions they decide upon - optimizing tasks, big or small.
This solution gives SOC teams the time and resources they need to focus on more meaningful tasks and utilize their abilities to the fullest extent. In consequence, SOC team members will experience greater job satisfaction. In 2021, 77% of respondents in a survey on cybersecurity professionals claimed to be satisfied or extremely satisfied with their role. There’s no question that this number correlates with the growing adoption rates of automation technologies over recent years, as automation has the ability to make work easier and more meaningful for SOC teams.
Plus, with more time on their hands, SOC teams can empower themselves through skills development. The top five anticipated areas of professional development in security professionals include cloud security, risk assessment, AI/ML, governance and compliance, and threat intelligence analysis. These specialities are drastically growing in relevance and popularity. With AI-Assisted Cybersecurity, SOC teams will have the time to further their own skills in areas such as these, thus equipping your organization with these niche skills as well.
By supporting your SOC team with AI-Assisted Cybersecurity, companies can empower their SOC team to not only maintain security but improve it. While the AI-Assisted Cybersecurity solution automates mundane tasks, SOC teams can focus on projects that drive them - and your organization - forward. As a result, your entire company will benefit from an enhanced level of security.
