In an era of rapidly advancing cyber threats, organisations are struggling to keep up with the growing demand for skilled cybersecurity professionals.
With the talent shortage showing no signs of easing, businesses must rethink their approach to security operations, argues Dan Bridges, Technical Director – International, Cyware.
Organisations around the world are battling to fill key positions, especially when it comes to cybersecurity-related roles. Although the UK has made significant improvements in training new potential talent for the cyber security labour market, according to the government last year, around half of businesses have skills gaps in basic technical areas. Considering how quickly malicious threats are evolving in complexity, it is a significant challenge.
When faced with such a shortfall in skills, SOC teams can become stretched and therefore vulnerable. The question, then, is how we can best bolster those responsible for the detection, investigation, and mitigation of cyber threats, and ensure they have the tools they need to perform threat intelligence and incident analysis, intrusion detection and incident response.
Introducing automation
SOC teams are often understaffed and struggle to handle the sheer volume of alerts and log data that must be analysed hourly – a time-consuming and repetitive task. Such a workload frequently leads to fatigue and burnout, not to mention leaving security teams with less time to focus on the more strategic and important tasks, such as protecting networks and systems.
This is where automation and integrated threat intelligence platforms come into play. Automation improves productivity by addressing resource limitations in stretched security teams. When applied to tasks like threat intelligence sharing, hunting, and response, it streamlines operations, allowing teams to work more efficiently and effectively.
Eliminate grunt work
A modern, unified threat intelligence platform streamlines security operations by automating routine tasks typically managed by SOC teams. This allows leaner security teams to focus on critical priorities requiring immediate attention. While security orchestration gathers data from diverse sources, security automation executes responses and actions through predefined playbooks. By enhancing efficiency, this enables organisations to improve productivity, handle more incidents without increasing headcount, and reduce analyst fatigue—allowing them to accomplish more in less time.
Do more with less
An automated, vendor-agnostic threat intelligence platform provides the foundation for cross-functional workflows that can co-ordinate security and response actions across cloud-based, on-premise, or hybrid infrastructure. This enables organisations to seamlessly integrate diverse security tools and technologies without having to concern themselves with data orchestration problems. It also gives the security team a 360-degree view of the cybersecurity ecosystem and allows them to swiftly build customised workflows with little knowledge of coding skills.
Improve ROI
Collaborative threat intelligence boosts ROI by improving the scalability and efficiency of security workflows. Centralising the whole detection, analysis and response workflow into a single console reduces costs and enhances visibility, while eliminating tedious and disjointed manual workflows involving different security tools. This improves threat management in security teams by removing false positives and noise and, at the same time, facilitates enhanced integration between external threat intelligence, internal threat intelligence, and suspicious incidents. Taken together, these benefits positively impact the bottom line.
Strength in numbers
Collective defence can amplify cybersecurity efforts, reduce the need for in-house expertise, and help businesses stay ahead of emerging threats. It revolves around organisations, such as industry peers, government partners, Information Sharing and Analysis Centres (ISACs), and Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations (ISAOs), working together to share intelligence, coordinate responses, and strengthen their overall security posture to power collective defence. By pooling resources and intelligence, organisations can detect and respond to threats more effectively. Instead of operating in isolation, businesses can leverage shared threat intelligence to identify attack patterns, vulnerabilities, and emerging risks. This collaborative approach enables faster incident response and enhances overall resilience.
Adding AI
AI is critical to effective automation, bridging the skills gap by automating routine tasks, enhancing efficiency, and allowing human experts to focus on more important security concerns. By deploying AI-driven threat intelligence to proactively identify emerging cyber risks, companies can maximise their cybersecurity capabilities and optimise their workforce without compromising security resilience. AI can also help automated response systems to mitigate attacks without manual intervention, predictive analytics to anticipate vulnerabilities before exploitation, and AI-driven security chatbots for handling routine security queries and support requests.
By embracing automation, intelligence-driven AI-powered workflows, and collective defence strategies, organisations can optimise their security operations and build a more resilient defence against evolving cyber threats. This will effectively address the skills gap, enabling organisations to bolster their cybersecurity posture without over-relying on hard-to-find experts, and will provide actionable insights for cybersecurity leaders to address the talent shortage and stay ahead in the fight against cybercrime.
Now is the time to manage the full threat intelligence lifecycle across CTI, Attack Surface Management, and Digital Risk Protection by combining security automation, threat response, security orchestration and incident response in one holistic solution that won’t overburden your strained SOC team or require precious new employees to support.
About the Author
Dan Bridges is Technical Director – International at Cyware. Cyware helps enterprises transform security operations while breaking through silos for threat intelligence sharing, collaboration, and automated threat response. Its unique Cyber Fusion solutions enable lean security teams to proactively stop threats, connect the dots on security incidents, dramatically reduce response time, and reduce analyst burnout from repetitive tasks. Cyware improves security outcomes for enterprises, government agencies, and MSSPs, and provides threat intelligence sharing platforms for the majority of ISAC/ISAO information sharing communities globally.
