Building an in-house SOC represents a significant commitment, both financially and strategically, to securing your enterprise. In a report from the Ponemon Institute—based on a survey sponsored by Devo of more than 500 IT and security practitioners—67 percent of respondents said their SOC was “very important” or “essential” to their organization’s overall cybersecurity strategy.

You’ve probably heard by now that we face a severe shortage of cybersecurity professionals with the skills and experience necessary to effectively defend against today’s—and tomorrow’s—threats. Cybersecurity Ventures estimates there will be 3.5 million unfilled jobs globally by 2021. Fortunately, there are key areas of the SOC workflow that can be automated to take advantage of security analyst intuition and act as a force multiplier.

The security operations center (SOC) plays a critical role in an enterprise organization’s efforts to protect their data from rapidly evolving cybersecurity threats. However, for a variety of reasons revealed in this report by the Ponemon Institute—based on a survey sponsored by Devo of more than 500 IT and security practitioners—organizations are frustrated with their SOC’s lack of effectiveness in performing its vital work.

As someone who began working in security operations centers (SOC) more than 30 years ago, back when we were known as computer incident response teams (CIRT), I am acutely aware of just how challenging it is to make a living as a SOC analyst. That’s why I’m so enthusiastic about the new Devo Security Operations Platform we launched recently.