SOC employee turnover: Retaining institutional knowledge

 

If you have spent any time as a manager or executive working in IT, you have probably struggled with keeping security operations running smoothly when a senior member of your team suddenly leaves the organization.

Retaining institutional knowledge is an ongoing battle IT professionals have been fighting for quite some time, and the problem isn’t going away. In fact, a recent survey of 700 IT hiring managers by Dice.com revealed that employee turnover is one of the most significant challenges they currently face.

When a senior staffer departs, if you have not adequately standardized and captured the processes that individual put in place, your team is left with no roadmap for security operations management moving forward. As a result, the day that person walks out the door you become ill-equipped to handle the mountain of security alerts most organizations now contend with on a daily basis. Additionally, your team is going to have to spend significant time re-creating best practices from scratch just to get back close to the same level of capability you were at before the senior team member departed.

One of the biggest reasons this problem persists is that manually documenting, centralizing and standardizing processes is a painstaking endeavor that takes more time than most IT security professionals have to spare.

Automated security operations management

But if your team has the ability to continuously and automatically document security response procedures—and keep those processes in one central location—you ensure that your team won’t be left in the dark no matter which staffer leaves the company. A security operations management platform can provide you with exactly that capability, allowing you to document repeatable steps that have proven effective for security incident management and threat resolution. Such a platform also allows you to:

  • Ramp up new team members faster by using documented procedures for training
  • Refine processes over time to improve
  • Optimize efficiency by automating standardized processes for high volume, low complexity tasks

So if you’ve been mired in a constant state of worry, and concerned about what would happen if your most senior team member left your organization tomorrow, consider how much better you could sleep knowing that everything would carry on without missing a beat.

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