Most SOC Analysts Are Planning to Quit Next Year

Organizations could be facing a tough 2023 after new research revealed that 64% of security operations center (SOC) analysts are likely to change jobs next year.

Irish startup Tines polled 468 full-time security operations (SecOps) analysts who work at companies with 500 or more employees to understand better the pressures they’re facing.

Its Voice of the SOC Analyst report found that 71% are experiencing some level of burnout, possibly driven by the fact that 69% are understaffed, and 60% have seen their workload increase over the past year.

Almost two-thirds (64%) said they are spending over half their time on tedious manual work, and around the same number (66%) believe half to all of their tasks could be automated.

Tool bloat also appears to be contributing to inefficiencies in the SOC: over half (53%) of respondents claimed they use between 11 and 30 products for security-related work.

Respondents cited reporting (50%) as the most time-consuming task, followed by threat monitoring (47%), intrusion detection (38%), general detection work (32%) and operations (31%).

Triaging (18%), reporting (16%) and monitoring (13%) were cited as the tasks analysts like the least, according to the research.

“While understaffing and low budgets do hold teams back, what’s dragging them under is repetitive, manual tasks, which in turn keep them from working on higher-impact projects that contribute to their organization’s overall security posture,” argued Tines co-founder Thomas Kinsella.

“Our goal with this research is to help security leaders recognize what they can do to streamline their processes, decrease burnout, increase retention, and create better work environments for their analysts overall.”

The study chimes somewhat with a Trend Micro report from last year, which found that 70% of SOC teams feel “emotionally overwhelmed” by the volume of alerts they must manage.

A separate report from the UK’s Chartered Institute of Information Security (CIISec) last year found that over half (51%) of cybersecurity professionals are kept up at night by the stress of the job and work challenges.