Newly released data from CyberRes, a Micro Focus (LSE: MCRO; NYSE: MFGP) line of business, has found that UK security operations centres (SOCs) are primarily struggling with adopting and managing their expanding IT real-estate. Expanding workloads to cover cloud and hybrid environments is the UK’s highest rated challenge at 40%, followed closely by monitoring security across a growing attack surface at 39%. Investigating, validating, and prioritising the number security incidents comes third at 36.4%, with the sheer volume of incident processing required across these nodes overwhelming teams, as over half of organisations have either adopted or expanded a bring your own device (BYOD) policy.

To combat these challenges, the UK SOCs are investing heavily in staff numbers and training. 62% have increased staffing over the last 12 months, and 84% increased training spend. SOCs predict the top three areas that will benefit from increased staffing to be:

• Attack detection and analysis 78.2%
• Security awareness training 63.6 %
• Vulnerability assessment and patching 56.4%

Further to this, 85.5% have increased monitoring and auditing of remote work access and privileges.

“Meaningful cyber investment in people, technologies, and practices has kept pace with the UK’s rapid digital maturation over the last year,” added Ramsés Gallego, International CTO, CyberRes. “Talent acquisition remains a challenge for all SOCs, as does the increasingly complex and growing tech stack, but UK organisations are wising up to the need for inherent cyber resilience across the entire business. This in turn is driving cyber priorities up the chain of command.”

For more information, findings and insights, download the 2021 State of Security Operations report from CyberRes here.