Your SOC is not understaffed. It is overloaded with noise.
Phishing response does not fail because teams lack skill. It fails because too much time is spent on manual investigation and repetitive tasks that do not scale.
The Core Problem
Security operations centers (SOCs) are judged by metrics like Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) and False Positive Rate. These are not vanity metrics. They measure real risk and operational efficiency. Tracking MTTR helps teams identify bottlenecks and reduce impact on business continuity and customer trust.
Yet today, many SOCs still waste hours every week on manual work such as:
- Parsing email headers line by line
- Correlating indicators across multiple tools
- Revalidating threats already seen across the enterprise
This manual work does not improve security outcomes. It just delays response and increases exposure windows. High MTTR can signal delayed response and higher risk of compromise.
Why MTTR Stays High
Common barriers include:
- Fragmented tools slow handoffs
Disparate systems force analysts to jump between consoles and copy data manually, wasting valuable time every day. - Inconsistent analyst decisions delay action
Without consistent enrichment and context, two analysts might make two different decisions on the same threat. Inconsistent classification increases frustration and delay. - Manual workflows do not scale
Manual phishingtriageand investigation can take tens of minutes to over an hour per case. Thatadds upquickly when threats arrive in volume.
The result is longer exposure windows, delayed containment, and burned-out teams.
The Impact of Automation When Done Right
Automation alone is not enough. The goal is automation with intelligence, so analysts see fewer alerts and higher-confidence cases. Modern solutions use contextual reasoning to filter noise and let analysts focus on real threats.
According to industry data on SOC automation:
- One organization reduced 144,000 monthly alerts to about 200 actionable cases.
- Another cut phishing response time from one week to under two minutes using automation supported by intelligent enrichment and prioritization.
This kind of improvement shows that the problem is not headcount but workflow and intelligence delivery.
How Cofense Helps
Cofense shortens phishing MTTR without adding headcount by giving your SOC:
- Instant context and enrichment
Report-to-resolution workflows start with fully enriched email intelligence, not raw alerts. - Automated classification using human-validated intelligence
Analysts see high-confidence true threats and filtered false positives. - Enterprise-wide threat removal in seconds
Suspect messages can be remediated broadly across mailboxes without manual search.
All of this means your team spends time where it matters most: on confirmed threats that require real investigation.
Scale the “Fense”
Reducing phishing MTTR does not require more boots on the ground. It requires smarter workflows, better context, and automation that eliminates noise and manual drudge work.
Would you rather waste hours parsing threats or spend that time stopping breaches before they escalate?
See Cofense in action. Request a demo today.
