A Security Operations Center (SOC) is crucial for housing an information security team as they monitor and analyze an enterprise’s security posture. However, the SOC often becomes unbalanced because of the exponential growth of security-relevant data and the limited amount of skilled security analysts to handle that data. In this discussion, participants agreed that enterprises must undergo a balancing act as they decide what funding should go towards building in-house talent or buying any necessary outsource talent. Currently, it is difficult to hire professionals, even a SOC analyst, because they’ve also been offered different opportunities they can pursue. As a result, employers are concerned that alert fatigue and repetition are making this role unattractive for prospects. Historically, a SOC analyst has faced a lack of novelty in their position, equated with a proofreader who is forced to look at the same document, glossing over obvious typos because of dull repetition. The participants agreed that in order to be successful in building and maintaining a SOC, a sense of novelty has to be added back into the SOC analyst role, and automation holds the keys to doing so. By distilling security events down to only the ones that require cognition and potential response, enterprises will find it less likely that their SOC analysts will burnout from their roles. In addition, to retain SOC analysts, it is critical to offer them mentorship and upward mobility; after all, as Moderator Steven Singer noted, no one wants to be stuck at being a career analyst.