Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

In this week’s episode of The Future of Security Operations podcast, I'm joined by Travis Howerton, Co-founder and CEO of RegScale. Travis began his security career with roles at government and regulated organizations, including the National Nuclear Security Administration and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, before being inspired by inefficiencies in compliance processes to co-found RegScale.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with traditional SOC. Many SOC teams do great work within this structure. But there are also serious issues with the three-tier model - it’s rigid, costly, and unsustainable for any company that isn’t a large enterprise. In the push to address these limitations, the concept of an “autonomous SOC” has emerged, with some vendors already claiming to offer fully autonomous solutions.

At this stage in AI's evolution, we’ve all heard the big promises - and overpromises - from vendors. But what about the people on the front lines of security operations? How are real practitioners feeling about using AI in their day-to-day work? In a recent webinar with guest speaker Allie Mellen, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, we dug into how AI is actually being adopted in the SOC - what’s working, what’s not, and what's getting lost in the noise.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, demand for security analysts is expected to grow by more than 30% over the next decade, far outpacing the average for other roles. That’s good news for those entering or advancing in the field. But with heavy workloads and constant pressure to keep up with evolving threats, professional development can easily fall by the wayside. So how can security analysts stand out to hiring managers — and make sure their career path stays on track?

Scaling IT operations was never going to be easy. By 2025, it was fair to expect that technology would ease classic challenges like high workloads, rising operational costs, and end-user friction. Yet IT leaders still face mounting pressure across identity and access management (IAM), endpoint management, request fulfillment, and incident response. Today’s end users are more demanding. IT operations are more complex. And time is in short supply.

Retail companies are high-value targets for cybercriminals. With sprawling infrastructures, complex supply chains, and large amounts of customer data, retailers are a goldmine for bad actors. In 2024, the retail sector accounted for 24% of all cyberattacks — more than any other industry. The average cost of a data breach in retail rose to $3.28 million.