Your security teams need to be on top of their game to handle the real threats to your business that could cost you millions, but they also need support to deal with the massive avalanche of attempts that come your way every day.
Without that support, you’re only increasing the risk that your security team burns out before they’re really put to the test. The good news is you have multiple ways to mitigate and support your teams, and boost your defenses:
1. Start By Mitigating Low-Priority Alerts
One of the biggest contributors to burnout in security teams is alert fatigue. If they have to respond to every alert like it could be the big breach, they are going to burn out. They do that, they’ll stop responding to threats appropriately, increasing the risk of a real criminal getting through your defenses.
The best way to avoid this is simple: mitigate those low-level, non-actionable, or false-positive alerts from the get-go. You can do this easily with a system like Red Canary. Their managed detection and response system can reduce the current average of 55 alerts a day to just one per week by filtering out low-priority alerts.
2. Unify and Improve Your System so It’s Proactive
AI tools excel at prediction, but even with their advanced capabilities of understanding unstructured data, they have their limits. To beef up your AI defense and improve your team’s ability to protect and respond to threats, you need your system unified and locked down. You can do this with a single defense stack, like Microsoft’s suite of security systems, or with your own integrated solution. Regardless, you’ll need to ensure that your systems and data, are integrated and optimally set up.
Once again, this works to boost your system’s automated proactivity, which in turn reduces the strain on your security teams to keep them fresh for those anomalous (and dangerous) viruses.
3. Make Their Roles Adaptable
Just as soldiers get leave, you should similarly cycle your security team between roles. For example, if you have two security specialists, you can have them rotate, where one week they are actively dealing with threats, and the next they are working to improve your system’s guidelines or even training to improve their own skills. This approach works to diversify their workload while simultaneously benefiting your business.
4. Reward Their Efforts
You want to attract and retain the top talent who can outmaneuver the world’s biggest white-collar criminals, and to do that, they need to stay motivated. That’s why it’s so important to really track their performance and reward them with career advancement, bonuses, or even something as simple (and hopefully regular) as a long lunch out covered by the corporate credit card.
Other simple ways to keep morale up are to enforce strict clock-out times, breaks, and more. Even something as simple as setting up a reminder to look away from a screen and do some stretches can help keep morale up amongst your security teams.
Whatever works, do it. Combine a good company culture with a reward system, and you’ll have a highly motivated team working hard to protect your business from all emerging threats.