- SOC teams face increasing challenges in managing security operations due to expanding workloads and the complexity of defending larger attack surfaces.
- Cost and technical complexity are significant barriers to adopting security automation tools like SOAR, though automation offers potential benefits such as faster response times and reduced manual tasks.
- Phishing response, vulnerability management, and incident handling are top areas targeted for automation, though integration and ease of use remain crucial factors in selecting automation platforms.
As security operations centers (SOCs) handle larger volumes of data and tasks, automation tools like Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) have become critical for improving efficiency. Despite the promise of automation, many organizations still face challenges in fully realizing its benefits. A SANS Institute survey found that defending an expanding attack surface is the top challenge for SOC teams, while cost and the complexity of maintaining automation tools are significant barriers to adoption. Many organizations use more than 10 security tools, which creates additional burdens in integrating data and managing responses efficiently.
Phishing response, vulnerability management, and incident handling are the most common areas where SOCs have implemented automation. Many teams aim to automate over half of their incident responses to reduce manual workloads and improve response times. However, the engineering effort required to deploy and maintain these tools and concerns about interoperability have hindered wider adoption. As a result, organizations prioritize choosing automation platforms that are easy to integrate with other security tools and come with pre-built playbooks.
The report emphasizes that although automation has potential, SOCs must balance these tools’ technical complexity and cost with their benefits. Human expertise remains crucial, especially in analyzing alerts and incidents that require deeper judgment. Automation solutions that streamline processes and offer transparency without adding significant management overhead will likely become key in helping SOC teams operate more efficiently.
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