Data breaches continue to make headlines, with the average cost of a data breach hitting approximately $4.88 million worldwide. Yet the security operations center (SOC) engineers and analysts charged with preventing these disasters are rarely appreciated.
SOC engineers work tirelessly, wrestling with tool sprawl, tuning endless security information and event management (SIEM) rules, and scaling security for growing businesses, all while knowing one misconfiguration could spell catastrophe.
When 900 security professionals from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe were surveyed, 63% reported experiencing burnout due to mounting job demands, tighter budgets, and difficulty in finding qualified talent. Even more alarming is the number of threads on Reddit where SOC team members go to express their frustration, continuous trials, sense of defeat, and, yes, burnout.
SOC burnout is real and could have significant consequences across industries. When it comes to cybersecurity, success is often invisible, but failure is frequently highlighted. AI can change this.
Reactive SecOps can’t keep up with business expansion or attackers using advanced AI tools. By adopting AI, like Radiant Security’s adaptive AI SOC platform, and aligning SecOps with business goals, you can prevent burnout, scale efficiently, and secure your organization.
What challenges do SOC teams face?
SOC teams are under relentless pressure, on alert 24/7, with grueling shifts and unconventional working hours. It’s a high-stakes game where one missed alert or unmitigated risk can lead to a devastating data breach.
Below are some common obstacles teams face while aiming to secure an organization on a daily basis.
Tool sprawl and alert fatigue
SOC engineers face burnout from tool sprawl, data overload, repetitive configuration tasks, and the pressure to scale systems with limited resources. SOC analysts must continuously act to counter threats and respond to notifications requiring immediate analysis. With alerts quickly adding up to as many as thousands per day, they also have to deal with numerous false positives.
Managing a daily explosion of notifications has a psychological impact, too, namely, alert fatigue, poor individual performance, and an overall negative impact on the team. Security alerts are multiplying faster than SOC teams can handle them, with 97.6% of organizations experiencing an annual surge in volume.
The endless flow of notifications can lead to desensitization, even among the most experienced members of a SOC team. When this happens, teams can easily miss genuine threats hidden within the flood of notifications.
Skills gap and high turnover
According to ISC2, the cybersecurity workforce gap was estimated to be around 4.8 million professionals globally in 2024, representing a 19% increase from 2023. At the same time, another study found that 64% of respondents saw the current skills gap as a bigger hurdle to achieving security than staffing shortages.
SOC teams must also constantly adapt to new threat vectors and learn to address over 3,000 new Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) each month in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The constant demand to adapt to new threats while learning about new vulnerabilities can lead to high turnover.
Complexity, communication gaps, and lack of automation
When a single compliance misstep can result in fines totaling millions of dollars, it can keep the team perpetually on edge.
SOC engineers are constantly under pressure to maintain compliance across complex frameworks, including:
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- California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
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- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
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- Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
Coordinating incident response across fragmented teams also leads to communication gaps, which can further drive burnout. The lack of automation only exacerbates the issue.
Static playbooks can take months to develop and require constant updates, forcing the team to engage in repetitive tasks such as manual log reviews and compliance checks, which consume hours and lead to exhaustion.
Psychological impact
ISACA’s “State of Cybersecurity 2024” report states that 66% of respondents reported higher levels of occupational stress than they reported five years ago. Another 81% attributed this escalating stress to an increasingly complex threat environment.
Managing intricate security tools such as SIEM, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR)—especially when configuration and troubleshooting are happening under pressure—creates a recipe for chronic stress.
Repetitive tasks, like log normalization and rule tuning, while scaling security measures as the business grows, can leave SOC teams feeling overwhelmed. The emotional toll is high, particularly when SOC teams often receive little praise for preventing attacks but plenty of blame when disaster strikes.
Proper tooling and the right platform can help SOC teams overcome these challenges. Unfortunately, as the next section shows, many are not up to the task.
Why do traditional security tools fall short?
Security tools can contribute to burnout among SOC teams.
For instance, SIEM solutions often come with high log management costs that can strain budgets, causing teams to operate with fewer personnel at suboptimal levels. Meanwhile, the complexity of SOAR tools means that teams spend considerable time on configuration and upkeep.
Analysts face a double burden: managing intricate detection rules and filtering through countless false alerts (as neither SIEM nor SOAR tooling helps with triaging the actual alerts). Manual correlation processes also extend the mean time to detect (MTTD) and the mean time to repair/respond/resolve (MTTR), resulting in an average dwell time of 10 days.
The combination of tool sprawl, increasing complexity, and manual tasks can further exacerbate analyst burnout.
How can AI help SOC teams stay engaged?
By automating routine tasks and reducing stress, AI can dramatically improve SOC team morale and productivity and your company’s security stance.
The beauty of automation
Here’s one example: By filtering out false positives and automating repetitive alert triage, AI frees analysts to focus on genuine threats.
This reduction in manual grunt work minimizes overtime, allowing teams to dedicate time to proactive threat hunting and upskilling. This boosts morale and improves the team’s focus on the task at hand. Automation is the perfect partner because AI-powered tools excel at identifying anomalies, including insider threats, through rapid, large-scale data analysis and behavioral pattern recognition.
Fast threat detection
AI slashes MTTD through real-time pattern recognition and behavioral analysis capabilities.
AI-powered SOC platforms continuously monitor user behavior and network traffic, detecting threats in real time and allowing for quick mitigation. They can also monitor system logs in real time to instantly identify anomalies.
AI-driven systems establish baseline behaviors and quickly spot deviations that might indicate threats, often catching attacks that traditional signature-based tools miss. AI also automates alert correlation, instantly analyzing alerts from multiple sources to distinguish actual threats from false positives, dramatically reducing the time analysts spend investigating benign alerts.
Effective, quick response
For MTTR, AI enables automated incident response and immediate containment measures.
Within seconds of threat detection, smart algorithms can isolate affected systems, implement a predetermined response, and inform the security team.
This orchestrated response capability enables AI to execute complex workflows without human intervention, including isolating infected systems, blocking malicious IP addresses, and initiating backup procedures.
The impact is substantial: Organizations that leverage AI and automation in their security efforts can detect and contain incidents more quickly than those that don’t.
Leveraging adaptive AI with Radiant
Tools like Radiant Security’s adaptive AI SOC Platform automate triage and investigations for all alert types (not just a handful of pre-trained use cases). This reduces hours of manual work to minutes, enhancing human-AI collaboration.
Real results
One client, Spellman, used Radiant to automate tier-1 triage and investigation, saving hundreds of monthly security engineering hours and, of course, boosting their bottom line.
Similarly, Proto Express, a Single Point of Contact client, received 653,089 alerts over a year-long period. Radiant’s adaptive AI SOC platform triaged them all and generated just 29 incidents. That’s a whopping 99.999996% reduction in false positives. Without Radiant, Proto Express would have had to hire 56 full-time analysts at an estimated cost of $9.8 million to handle these 653,089 alerts. Considering that they only had five SOC analysts, this represents a roughly 1,000% increase in analyst productivity.
AI-driven proactive security
Radiant also provides integrated responses, like AI-generated responses or actions, that an SOC analyst can execute with speed and accuracy in a single click. Once security teams have confidence in the AI platform’s recommendations, they can unleash a fully autonomous SOC, helping organizations transform from reactive to proactive.
Easy learning curve
Radiant is known for easy onboarding and a straightforward learning curve, which helps junior analysts ramp up much faster without burdening senior team members. Observing how AI conducts triage (with transparency into the reasoning behind every triage step) and seeing the recommended remediation actions helps junior analysts get up to speed.
Conclusion
SOC analysts and engineers are exhausted, and many have been switching careers, leaving organizations exposed. It’s time to turn the tide with the power of AI.
Contextual data, actionable intelligence, and enhanced human-AI collaboration transform SOC engineers and analysts from overwhelmed, reactive threat detectors into proactive enterprise defenders thriving in a sustainable work environment.
Let’s stop treating our SOC engineers like machines. Protect your people and business with Radiant Security’s AI-powered adaptive AI SOC platform. Ready to support your security professionals while staying clear of the headlines? Book a demo to see the future of SOC today.
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