The 10-Hour Problem: How Visibility Gaps Are Burning Out the SOC
Why analysts are tired — and why better visibility is the fastest way to fix it
Security teams aren’t drowning because the threats improved. They’re drowning because the visibility got worse.
The October 2025 commissioned Forrester Consulting study conducted on behalf of NETSCOUT surfaces a problem that every analyst already knows:
61% of survey respondents say their analysts spend more than ten hours a week in the “analyze” phase alone.
This isn’t a time-management issue. It’s a clarity issue.
Why Analysts Are Overwhelmed
Most investigations start the same way:
- An alert fires
- The context is partial
- The data is dispersed
- The logs are incomplete
- The analyst starts correlating manually
This is the invisible cost of poor visibility.
Every alert becomes a puzzle, and analysts become professional puzzle-solvers. But puzzles don’t scale. Not when attacks move faster than your reconstruction speed.
The Hidden Cost of Insufficient NAV
The Forrester study shows that teams lacking strong Network Analysis and Visibility capabilities struggle to:
- Achieve holistic visibility
- Understand lateral movement
- Reduce time spent in the analyze phase
- Integrate NAV into their broader security ecosystem
These weaknesses compound into more alerts, more manual work, and more analyst fatigue.
And fatigue isn’t just a human problem. It’s a security problem.
Tired teams miss things. Burned-out analysts quit.
Turnover destroys institutional knowledge. Response becomes slower, not faster.
The Fastest Way to Reduce SOC Burnout Isn’t More People, It’s More Clarity
When analysts have reliable evidence from the start:
- Alerts become easier to validate
- Investigations shrink from hours to minutes
- TDIR becomes streamlined
- Confidence increases
- Stress decreases
Better visibility creates better humans. Because the job becomes about judgment, not assembly.
Where Omnis Cyber Intelligence Fits
This is where platforms like Omnis Cyber Intelligence quietly change the day-to-day reality for analysts: not by adding new workflows, but by eliminating unnecessary ones.
Omnis Cyber Intelligence delivers what analysts need most:
- Packet-level truth they can trust
- Correlated metadata that explains behavior, not just records it
- Three-click investigations that turn hunting from a chore, into a capability
- Hybrid visibility so analysts don’t have to stitch together cloud and on-prem traffic by hand
When investigations begin with clarity instead of chaos, burnout fades. Not because the work became easier, but because it became understandable.
The SOC of the Future Will Be Built on Visibility
If leaders want to retain talent, reduce noise, and accelerate response, the fix isn’t superficial. It’s structural.
Better visibility → better investigations → better morale → better resilience.
The Forrester study makes the scale of the problem clear. We believe solutions like Omnis Cyber Intelligence make the path forward practical.
Read the commissioned Forrester Consulting Opportunity Snapshot