A growing majority of companies consider their security operations center (SOC) to be essential or important to their ability to secure their business and data, but the challenges in maintaining SOCs have expanded in the past year, the Ponemon Institute states in its second annual "Economics of Security Operations Centers" report, published on Jan. 12.
Questions regarding the return on investment of security operations and the increasing cost of retaining security analysts are among the most significant challenges uncovered by the study. More than half of respondents — 51% — consider SOCs to be less valuable, despite the number of breaches increasing, according to the Ponemon Institute. Exacerbating the issues, the average cost of a managed security service provider (MSSP) has increased to $5.3 million, up from $4.4 million in 2019, according to the report.
Along with the coronavirus pandemic, security teams have had to deal with the perennial problems of high stress, information overload, and a lack of network visibility, resulting in SOCs failing to live up to their potential in the minds of security leaders, according to the report. To combat negative security trends, automation, analyst training, and the adoption of more efficient technology can help, says Chris Triolo, chief customer officer at Respond Software, which sponsored the Ponemon survey.
Companies need to "scale security operations past manual capabilities to deal with increasing threats and to reduce SOC workloads, while better enabling analysts to manage critical incidents," he says.
The last year has been challenging for security operations teams. Not only have most SOCs had to move to a remote or virtual model because of the pandemic, but the average employee is no ..
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