Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Analysts are being weighed down by mundane, tedious tasks, preventing them from doing their best work, causing burnout, and leading them to the point of wanting to leave their jobs. SOC analysts' biggest frustration and one of their top challenges is having to spend time on manual tasks, according to our recent report, 'The Voice of the Analyst.' These tasks are not only repetitive, but they're taking them away from more engaging, higher-impact work.

With agile development, the software development life cycle has evolved, with a focus on customer satisfaction to enhance product features based on user feedback. This helps shorten the time to market, since teams can release a minimally viable product, then continuously improve its features. The agile technique encourages team cooperation through sprints, daily standups, retrospectives, testing, quality assurance and deployment.

For security teams, properly managing which users can access resources and governing the level of access those users have is about as basic as locking the door at night. Understandably then, there are thousands of options available to fine-tune or revoke access, and it’s likely that issues come up daily for most companies—if not hourly.

There’s no question that centralized identity and access management (IAM) helps companies reduce risk and prevent attacks. But, as this week’s Okta attack shows, centralized IAM doesn’t eliminate all risks. Attackers with access to IAM data can use this information to easily access downstream systems or modify permissions to grant elevated access to malicious parties.

Security teams want to accomplish their best work — but they're being prevented from doing so. We recently surveyed 468 full-time security analysts for our 'Voice of the SOC Analyst' report to learn more about their day-to-day workloads, successes, and concerns. What we found was that seven out of ten analysts are either somewhat or very burned out, and that six out of ten analysts want to find a new job in the next year.

Just a few years ago, security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) was the new buzzword associated with security modernization. Today, however, SOAR platforms are increasingly assuming a legacy look and feel. Although SOARs still have their place in a modern SecOps strategy, the key to driving SecOps forward today is no-code security automation.

By now, you’ve probably read loads of articles that discuss the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on business, politics, the economy and much more.But what about SecOps? What permanent effects has COVID wrought on the way businesses secure IT assets? Let’s explore those questions by examining three key security trends that promise to endure long after the pandemic has finally receded.