Around 70 per cent of IT and SOC (security operation centre) teams feel their personal lives are being emotionally impacted by their work by managing IT threat alerts, a new report has said. This comes as the majority (51 per cent) feel their team is being overwhelmed by the volume of alerts and 55 per cent admit that they are not entirely confident in their ability to prioritise and respond to them.
According to the Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, which polled over 2,300 IT security and SOC decision-makers, it is no wonder therefore that teams are spending as much as 27 per cent of their time dealing with false positives. “To avoid losing their best people to burnout, organisations must look to more sophisticated threat detection and response platforms that can intelligently correlate and prioritise alerts,” Bharat Mistry, Technical Director, Trend Micro, said in a statement. “This will not only improve overall protection but also enhance analyst productivity and job satisfaction levels” he added.
Outside of work, the high volumes of alerts leave many security operations centers (SOCs) managers unable to switch off or relax and irritable with friends and family. Inside work, they cause individuals to turn off alerts (43 per cent do so occasionally or frequently), walk away from their computer (43 per cent), hope another team member will step in (50 per cent), or ignore what is coming in entirely (40 per cent).
With a staggering 74 per cent of respondents already dealing with a breach or expecting one within the year, and the estimated average cost per breach $235,000, the consequences of such actions could be disastrous, the report said.
