Security News > 2020 > June > Turf Battles and Silo Skirmishes Are Killing SOC Effectiveness: Survey
On the one hand, 72% of firms consider the SOC a key part of their security strategy; but on the other hand, 60% of SOC staff have considered changing careers because of stress, while 65% claim to have limited visibility into the attack surface.
A survey of 600 professionals working in IT and security, conducted by Ponemon and commissioned by Devo, seeks to better understand the causes behind the effective and ineffective areas of SOCs.
"There is," notes the report, "An eight-percentage-point increase among respondents who say their SOC is highly effective in gathering evidence, investigating, and identifying the source of threats." While that sounds promising, the improvement is only from 42% to 50%, meaning that half of the respondents still feel that the SOC is not performing well.
Pre-COVID-19, 68% of the respondents complained of too many alerts to chase, while 67% complained of information overload. Increased working from home - which is not likely to completely go away after the pandemic - brings in, said Waits, "a whole bunch of new threats and threat vectors where the SOC team now has to worry about what sort of things are running around on people's home computers that maybe they've never seen before."
Seventy-eight percent call for an improvement of visibility into the IT security infrastructure; 65% call for a solution to the turf or silo issues between IT ops and SOC teams; and 49% would like to see improved compliance with privacy and data protection requirements.