Security analysts: We know you’re overworked, understaffed and overwhelmed, and we understand that it’s not your fault. It’s not humanly possible for you to keep up with the ever-expanding threat landscape, especially given how busy you are with the day-to-day tasks of running your security operations center (SOC). We want you to know you’re not alone.

The Cybersecurity Skills Gap Is Only Getting Worse

According to research performed by the Enterprise Strategy Group, almost 51 percent of organizations in 2018 reported a “problematic shortage” of cybersecurity skills. Cybersecurity job fatigue is real, and according to ESG, almost 38 percent of security professionals claimed that the skills shortage has led to burnout and staff attrition. If you’re waiting for your job to magically become easier, you may want to think again; the situation is only getting worse.

Sure, the cybersecurity skills shortage and an ever-expanding threat landscape are valid excuses, but they’re not going to pay the bills when — not if — a data breach occurs. The Ponemon Institute found that average total cost of a data breach rose from $3.62 to $3.86 million in 2018, an increase of 6.4 percent from 2017.

Shorter Dwell Times Means Lower Costs

According to Ponemon, organizations that identified a breach in less than 100 days saved more than $1 million as compared to those that exceeded 100 days. Similarly, organizations that contained a breach in less than 30 days saved over $1 million as compared to those that took more than 30 days to resolve.

Simple, right? Identify the breach quickly and contain it to save your organization money. However, doing this when you receive more than 1 million daily security alerts is a daunting task, even for the best analysts. For those of you who aren’t security analysts, imagine having to sort and filter through a million emails in your inbox each day to figure out which require action and which are junk.

As a result, 30 percent of respondents to an Imperva survey admitted to having ignored certain categories of alerts, while 4 percent turned off the alert notifications altogether. Additionally, 56 percent admitted to having ignored an alert based on past experiences dealing with false positives.

Why You Should Adopt AI in the Security Operations Center

So, how do you combat cybersecurity job fatigue? Your best bet is to partner with artificial intelligence (AI) to force-multiply your team’s efforts in the security operations center. Here’s how to do it:

• Automate incident analysis. Don’t waste human capital on routine analysis. Instead, let AI automate your repetitive SOC tasks while your team focuses on mission-critical decisions, such as suspicious behavior from insider threats.
• Augment human intelligence. Upgrade your SOC by using AI to automatically find commonalities across incidents using cognitive reasoning to provide actionable feedback with context to your analysts.
• Respond rapidly to threats. Reduce dwell times with automated hunting for indicators and add pertinent information to act on escalations for remediation and/or blocking.

Register for the exclusive on-demand webinar, “5 Reasons AI Is the Pillar of the Next-Gen SOC,” to learn about the top five challenges plaguing today’s SOCs and how security leaders can free up their analysts by leveraging AI technologies to focus on crucial threats.

Sign up for the on-demand webinar