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Security operations centers (SOCs) are burning out. And no, more pizza parties won’t fix it.
According to the latest SANS SOC Survey, a staggering 84% of security professionals report feeling burned out. Nearly 70% say that relentless alert volumes are bleeding into their personal lives. Meanwhile, the cybersecurity workforce gap has grown 19% in the past year, leaving nearly 5 million roles unfilled.
Despite all the talk of “AI-powered SOCs,” the tools meant to help us have often let us down.
This is not a capacity problem. It’s a people problem. And the real fix requires putting humans back at the center of cyber defense.
AI Has Let the SOC Down — But It Doesn’t Have To
The promise of AI in security has been huge: faster detection, smarter analysis, fewer manual tasks. But too often, reality doesn’t live up to the hype.
The SANS survey paints a sobering picture. Many AI tools:
- Underperform in real-world use
- Are introduced without clear ownership or operational accountability
- Require complex integrations that take months — time SOCs simply don’t have
If AI needs six months of custom integrations to deliver value, it’s dead on arrival. SOC teams need help now, not next quarter.
And the fundamental question many security leaders forget to ask isn’t:
“Who owns AI?”
…but rather:
“Who owns triage today — and why is it failing?”
“Who owns false positive tuning — and what slows it down?”
“Who owns metrics reporting — and why is it still manual?”
AI isn’t a magic wand. It’s just another tool in the toolbox. It only delivers value when it’s deeply woven into the responsibilities and workflows of real humans.
It’s Not a Capacity Problem — It’s a Mental Health Crisis
Here’s what the SANS survey and other research make clear:
- 70% of analysts say alert volumes spill over into their personal lives.
- 84% of security professionals report feeling burned out.
- 47% of organizations are facing budget cutbacks.
- 62% say their organization isn’t doing enough to retain staff.
SOC burnout isn’t going to be fixed with wellness apps, breakroom yoga, or Friday pizza parties.
This is a business risk — not just a wellness problem.
When analysts leave, the SOC loses critical institutional knowledge, driving up risk, incident costs, and insurance premiums. The average cost of a cyberattack now stands at $4.88 million, while the cost of cyber insurance has jumped over 25% in a single year.
Burnout isn’t just a people problem. It’s a bottom-line problem.
Automation Helps — But Only If It’s Smart
One reason burnout is so severe is that security teams are drowning in repetitive, manual work — investigating endless false positives and piecing together context from scattered tools.
Good automation can relieve that pressure, tackling mundane tasks and freeing human analysts to focus on meaningful decisions. But bad automation simply delivers noise faster. Without the right context, automated alerts still leave humans asking:
- Is this real?
- Does this matter to our business?
- What should I do next?
Automation must run at high volume in the background, not simply wait for someone to push a button. And critically, it must deliver intelligence that’s tied directly to business risk — not just generic threat feeds.
Burnout comes not only from too many alerts but from feeling like the work doesn’t matter. That’s why automation alone isn’t enough.
Bridging the Gap Between Analysts and the Business
The SOC’s job isn’t just to stop threats. It’s to prove why stopping them matters.
That’s where many security programs struggle — and why burnout grows. Analysts see a threat one way. Executives and boards see risk in terms of dollars, downtime, and regulatory exposure.
When analysts don’t see how their work connects to business outcomes, the job becomes a grind. The result: more stress, more turnover, and a higher likelihood that critical threats slip through the cracks.
To secure budget, resources, and executive support — and to reduce burnout — SOC teams need to translate technical signals into business language. Instead of reporting:
“We have suspicious LSASS activity,”
leaders should be hearing:
“We need to hire someone with LSASS forensics expertise, which will reduce our risk exposure by $1.3 million.”
When security teams can map TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures) directly to financial outcomes, they empower leadership to make smarter decisions — and reduce analyst burnout because the value of their work is crystal clear.
How ThreatConnect Helps Put Humans Back at the Center
At ThreatConnect, we believe tools don’t save the SOC. People do.
Our job is to make sure your people want to stay — and to give them what they need to thrive. Here’s how we do it.
Practical AI That Works For Humans
We don’t build AI for AI’s sake. ThreatConnect AI is designed to augment defenders, not replace them.
Our approach combines deep AI expertise with decades of threat intelligence tradecraft to deliver practical, explainable AI solutions that:
- Correlate: Reveal connections between disparate data points, improving prioritization and context.
- Classify: Automatically tag, categorize, and align intelligence to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK — four times better than traditional methods.
- Accelerate: Distill massive data volumes into actionable insights, enabling faster, more confident decisions.
We’re not just detecting threats. We’re helping security teams understand threats in business terms.
35 million AI insights and a quarter trillion data points power our contextual intelligence, embedded directly into analyst workflows.
This isn’t an isolated feature. It’s natively integrated into SIEMs, SOARs, and daily security operations — with explainable AI models that show how decisions are made.
High-Scale Automation with Playbooks
ThreatConnect’s high-scale Playbooks enable security teams to automate complex investigations, enrichments, and responses — all without coding.
Unlike solutions that only trigger actions from a single tool, ThreatConnect Playbooks operate across your entire security stack, helping teams:
- Reduce false positives by automatically correlating signals across diverse data sources
- Execute consistent workflows that free analysts from manual tasks
- Adapt rapidly to new threat intelligence or changes in business risk
One customer eliminated over 60 manual workflows, saving $1.3 million per year in staff hours — and drastically reducing mean time to respond (MTTR).
With ThreatConnect, one SOC shrank their incident response time from 7 hours to 37 minutes.
Connecting TTPs to Dollars
Perhaps most critically, ThreatConnect uniquely helps teams map TTPs directly to business risk in financial terms.
Our Risk Quantifier capability translates threat intelligence into clear dollar impacts. Instead of vague risk scores, security leaders can show:
- Which TTPs put which business units at greatest financial risk
- How much risk reduction a new control or hire will achieve
- How to prioritize limited resources for maximum financial impact
That’s how you win budget conversations — and how you keep teams focused on the threats that truly matter.
“ThreatConnect has helped us measure risk across the company to make prioritization clear and defensible.” — Global Fortune 100 Healthcare Organization
People First, Always
We’re proud to help over 250 enterprises worldwide keep their teams focused, effective, and less burned out. Our customers report:
- 67% reduced MTTR by over 50%
- 79% improved collaboration between teams
- 63% cut false positives significantly
- 90% saved more than half their time on critical workflows
Burnout is a business risk. And while AI and automation are essential tools, they only work when they serve the people doing the job.
At ThreatConnect, we’re committed to making AI work for humans — not the other way around.
Let’s keep talking about how to put humans back at the center of cyber defense, register for a meeting today!