Security Operations Center (SOC) analysts face increasing pressure as cyber threats grow in sophistication and frequency.
Analysts often find themselves overwhelmed by relentless alert volumes, repetitive tasks, and the need for constant vigilance. This inevitably leads to burnout—a critical issue that impacts analyst health, team productivity, and organizational security posture.
At Intezer, we deeply empathize with analysts’ well-being and understand the need for operational efficiency. That’s why we’ve created The SOC Burnout Index—a simple yet powerful tool to better measure, understand, and manage burnout.
Why Analyst Burnout Matters
While the mental and physical health component is vitally important, burnout also directly impacts the cyber resilience of the entire organization:
- Higher Error Rates: Burnt out analysts make mistakes like overlooked threats and incorrect triage decisions.
- Increased Turnover: Constant and intense stress forces many analysts to seek new positions, triggering costly turnover.
- Lower Productivity: Over-worked analysts spend less time proactively hunting threats and improving processes.
Introducing The SOC Burnout Index
At Intezer, we’ve developed a practical way to quantify analyst burnout risk, while helping SOC and security leaders measure and communicate the impact of automation solutions.
How Is It Calculated?
The SOC Burnout Index quantifies how much your team exceeds or falls below a sustainable triage workload.
Step 1: Define Your Triage Threshold
Determine a realistic, sustainable triage workload threshold for your SOC team. According to industry research from Gartner and Ponemon Institute, analysts should spend no more than 4–6 hours per day on intensive triage to maintain productivity and minimize burnout.
For this example, let’s assume a threshold of 6 hours per analyst per day, across a team of 8 analysts.
Multiply the team size, by your analyst threshold and the number of workdays per month (typically 20 days):
Team Threshold (hours/month) = 8 analysts × 6 hours/day × 20 workdays/month = 960 hours/month
Step 2: Calculate Actual Triage Hours
Calculate your team’s actual alert triage hours per month (total time spent investigating alerts) both before and after the implementation of an automation solution.
For this example, let’s use the following figures based on what would be realistic for many Intezer customers:
- Actual Triage Hours Before Automation: 1844 hours/month
- Actual Triage Hours After Automation: 397 hours/month
Step 3: Measure Excess Load
Next, measure how much your team exceeded your team threshold before and after implementing automation:
Excess Load = max(0, Actual Triage Hours - Team Threshold)
- Excess Load Before Automation: 1844 – 960 = 884 hours
- Excess Load After Automation: 0 (since 397 hours < 960-hour threshold)
Step 4: Calculate The SOC Burnout Index
Determine The SOC Burnout Index for your organization by dividing excess load (before and after automation) by team threshold. Multiply each figure by 100 to get a percentage.
SOC Burnout Index (%) = (Excess Load ÷ Team Threshold) × 100
- The SOC Burnout Index Before Automation: (884 ÷ 960) × 100 ≈ 92.1%
- The SOC Burnout Index After Automation: (0 ÷ 960) × 100 = 0%
That’s a dramatic 92.1% team burnout reduction!
This means your team’s burnout risk—caused by excessive and repetitive workloads—is virtually eliminated through automation.
Why It Matters
Using The SOC Burnout Index aligns your SOC management practices with industry recommendations, providing clear insight into team health and enabling proactive burnout prevention.
The SOC Burnout Index offers security leaders a clear way to:
- Demonstrate ROI of investments in automation
- Communicate clearly with executives and budget-holders about the tangible human and operational impacts of automation
- Enhance analyst retention by proactively managing workload
Ultimately, measuring and managing your SOC Burnout Index leads to a more effective, sustainable security team, better-equipped to handle evolving cyber threats.
How Intezer Uses The SOC Burnout Index
At Intezer, we actively integrate The SOC Burnout Index into our ROI reports, helping security operations teams quantify the benefits of automation. In addition to team burnout reduction and excess load before/after automation (detailed above), the report also showcases the quantity of deescalated high-severity alerts.
These alerts, that were deemed as false positives by Intezer’s AI, could have otherwise woken analysts at night, despite requiring no action upon further investigation.
By leveraging this index, Intezer helps SOC teams not only quantify analyst well-being improvements but also demonstrate the real-world impact of AI-driven automation on security operations.
Ready to measure your SOC Burnout Index? Contact us to start your Autonomous SOC journey today.
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