IDC’s Voice of Security Report 2025 found that three in five companies have security operations center (SOC) teams with fewer than ten members, with 54.8% managing between 20–49 tools. Additional research finds 63% of SOC analysts report some level of burnout and 55% are considering changing jobs. Given the talent shortage for cybersecurity roles, it’s a bit unnerving to think more than half of your team may be burning out while cyber threats show no signs of slowing.
Your SOC is the foundational fortress protecting your company’s critical assets and infrastructure. Analysts working at a breaking point are less productive, taking more sick leave, and more prone to human error. This fatigue and stress results in higher risk, rather than strengthened resilience.
A State of Threat Detection and Response survey with security practitioners at companies with 1,000 or more employees found several causes of burnout, including:
But the words of cybersecurity practitioners say it best. The below quotes from threads on r/cybersecurity on Reddit express the frustration:
“Between constant alerts, firefighting, compliance headaches, and the occasional ‘drop everything, we're breached’ moment, it’s just... relentless. And if you're in a defensive role? Good luck ever feeling like you're truly ‘done’ with anything. There's always another vulnerability, another misconfiguration, another user clicking on something they shouldn't.”
From another thread:
“I currently do Incident Response, where previously I did Security Engineering, and it can be chaotic with the constant tickets coming in, pressure to contain devices in time, not miss anything, or run a big war room call with executives and officers for big incidents.”
What’s true is that cybersecurity truly relies on the caliber of the combination of people, process, and technology. Given the findings and statements above, it’s inspiring that security practitioners still feel optimism about their roles. Many are looking for more automation and incorporating AI to help them lighten their ever-increasing workloads.
Without an inexhaustible supply of talent, it’s important to preserve and nurture your existing SOC staff. What makes security professionals happy? IDC’s report found the ability to learn something new, creative problem solving, and a variety of challenging work as the top three. Collaboration and teamwork came in fourth.
Yet, SOC professionals aren’t spending enough time doing the meaningful work that drives satisfaction as a matter of course. According to 72%, their workloads have increased over the last year, pushing the possibility of getting to do work that inspires them farther away.
SOC analysts seek meaningful work that goes beyond just addressing alerts. They want to contribute to the industry, know they’re protecting their company’s critical assets, and solve the threat puzzles to stop attackers. Engaging in proactive tasks like threat hunting and collaborating with other teams can provide a sense of purpose and make the work more fulfilling.
With limited talent to fill cybersecurity roles, it’s important to maximize the staff you have with an intentional approach to retention and career growth. Removing the mundane, repetitive, manual tasks that keep your analysts from pursuing meaningful work is a worthy investment, and much less than continuing to hire more FTEs as alert volume increases and workloads continue to grow.
A customer-first, boutique MSSP can provide a combination of services from Co-managed MDR to Custom SOC services to help you accomplish this goal. This partnership creates an extension of your team to create breathing room for them to do meaningful work. Job satisfaction increases along with the confidence that they won’t miss a real attack. They’ll know they’re keeping pace with the battle to detect and prioritize real threats.
Additionally, the collaboration with security experts brings a depth of knowledge about new and evolving threats and guidance for security posture improvement. This collaboration helps your team see and evolve the impact they have on proactively using security to enable the business.
The pressing problems security professionals identify, include:
You’ll also gain more from the investments you’ve already made in your security tooling as your MSSP helps to configure and tune, along with creating custom runbooks and automations aligned with your security priorities.
Whether co-managed MDR or looking beyond monitoring, detection, and response to address the custom needs of your SOC, you can balance the level of flexibility and control you need from our partnership to enable your team to focus on meaningful work.
While the core capabilities of your SOC are growing, the balance likely still tilts more toward reactive work rather than proactive security. The 2025 SANS SOC Survey found that 85% of incident starts were primarily triggered by internal alerts. Partially automated threat hunting—used by 48% of respondents—tends to result in retroactive analysis vs. true, technique-driven hunts. And alerts designed to catch known threats may not catch sophisticated adversaries intent on avoiding detection.
There’s value in doing some of this work the hard way, using human expertise. As the SANS survey states, “True threat hunting relies on proven methodologies, hypothesis-driven analysis, and deep familiarity with attacker behavior.” That’s just part of what you’ll gain with a true MSSP partnership.
Partnering with a customer-first MSSP that brings security expertise and skill sets that remove the repetitive tasks and pressure causing stress and burnout results in a healthier, more productive team and a resilient security posture.