Trend Micro reveals over half of Security Operation Centers are overrun with redundant security tools

The global independent research uncovered serious challenges facing SOC teams tasked with detecting and responding to emerging cyber threats. Those defending organizations with more than 10,000 employees have an average of almost 46 monitoring tools in place.

Half (51%) of respondents claimed they no longer use many of these tools for reasons including:

• Lack of integration (42%)

• Lack of skilled professionals (39%)

• Difficulty understanding how to operationalize them (38%)

• Out of date (37%)

• Don’t trust them (20%)

The potential cost of these challenges is high: Respondents said that, on average, their organization stands to lose over $235,000 if they fall foul of the GDPR due to an incident.

“Tool sprawl is increasingly common in global organizations of all sizes, but when it comes to incident detection and response, there’s a growing but sometimes unacknowledged cost associated,” said Trend Micro’s Technical Director (UK) Bharat Mistry.

The research also found that 92% of respondents have considered managed services to outsource their detection and response capabilities. These service-based offerings typically can help to overcome in-house skills challenges, providing a single, unified version of the truth to drive improved incident response.

“Not only do organizations have to pay for licensing and maintenance, but SOC teams are increasingly stressed to the point of burnout trying to manage multiple solutions. Being unable to prioritize alerts may also expose the organization to breaches. It’s no surprise that many are turning to SOC-as-a-Service,” added Mistry.