SOC in the Near Future: How AI is Revolutionizing Security Operations Centers

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have been growing in recent years, with sophisticated new tools being developed for both business and personal use. The increase in popularity has put AI and ML in the spotlight, and organizations across all industries are increasingly looking to incorporate these technologies into their strategies.

Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are one major area where advancements in AI can enhance operations. They often suffer from an overwhelming number of alerts, making it difficult for human security teams to analyze and investigate them all. Incorporating AI into SOC operations can help relieve some of this burden.

Challenges of Traditional SOC Approaches

Attempting to protect large attack surfaces against a wide range of threats from many angles often leads to an overwhelming alert volume. SOC teams may be inundated with alerts and use up valuable time and resources to investigate false positives or low-priority risks. Processing, prioritizing, and investigating all of these alerts is more than most SOCs can handle.

Even beyond false positives, the necessary tasks associated with SOC operations are often time-consuming and repetitive. Dedicating human labor hours to this work can detract from pressing projects. In carrying out these tedious tasks, SOC teams also lack sufficient support for their security judgments in the absence of “tools that empower them to make risk-based decisions.”

The combination of all of these factors creates an environment ripe for security analyst fatigue. With too many jobs to complete in the time allotted to them, not enough support in making risk-based choices, and an abundance of repetitive tasks, SOC professionals can be more prone to making errors due to burnout.

AI Advances Reshaping SOC Operations

As with many other areas of cybersecurity and technology, AI and ML can alleviate much of the pressure on SOC operations. With the help of tools that leverage automation and continuous learning, SOCs can cut down on the amount of human power needed to carry out security operations.

The use of AI-empowered tools can enhance and innovate SOC capabilities in a number of ways:

• Fulfilling tedious and repetitive tasks that would otherwise take up a great deal of SOC teams’ time and labor.
• Providing in-depth analytics to help SOC teams make informed, risk-based decisions.
• Enabling more accurate and efficient threat detection, investigation, and remediation.
• Offering scalability to help organizations avoid overwhelming SOCs as business, data, and threats grow.
• Integrating data from a variety of sources for comprehensive visibility and analysis.
• Using ML algorithms to improve threat detection over time by analyzing baseline behavioral patterns and identifying anomalies.
• Automating certain immediate threat response actions to decrease the amount of time it takes to contain a threat once it is located.
• Using historical data and emerging trends to make predictions about potential future threats.

Reaping these advantages from AI-empowered tools can help SOC teams carry out their functions more efficiently and effectively, prevent fatigue and burnout, and innovate their threat protection strategies. These tools keep security systems and measures flexible and adaptable, enabling them to scale with business growth and respond to new and emerging threats. This increased efficiency can cut down on operational costs and costs invested in security tools, as well.

Future Considerations for AI Use in SOCs

Rather than simply assisting SOC teams and enhancing their existing strategies, AI is poised to empower an upheaval in how SOC operations are carried out. While some may fear that the increased use of AI in security operations will undercut human analysts and replace them, this could not be further from the truth. Security tools that use AI and ML can help evolve the role that SOC analysts fill in an organization.

Where traditionally, SOC operations have consisted of a large volume of repetitive tasks, the use of AI tools to automate those tasks can enable SOC professionals to dedicate their time and expertise to other projects. There are security operations and initiatives that require the skill and creativity that only human minds can possess, and streamlining the more tedious processes with AI frees up SOC teams’ time for those tasks. This can empower SOC analysts to develop more advanced security protocols and proactively hunt threats.

Integrating AI-enhanced tools into SOC operations requires a thoughtful approach to incorporating these advanced technologies into existing security infrastructure. It is vital for organizations to ensure smooth integration and secure configuration of these tools in order to reap the most benefit from them. With the right tools and implementation, organizations can enhance their SOC operations to be more efficient and effective in the short term and develop innovative new capabilities and ongoing improvements in the long term.

Conclusion

The use of AI and ML tools in cybersecurity can provide a wide range of benefits to organizations looking to streamline SOC operations and enhance their capabilities. SOC teams can take advantage of AI-empowered tools to automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks, augment threat detection and investigation abilities, and prevent SOC analyst burnout which leads to errors.

With the increased use of AI tools for SOC operations, SOC analysts can revolutionize the way they fight and remediate threats. They gain more time for proactive and creative security projects, more support in decision-making, and more effective threat detection and remediation.

About the author:

PJ Bradley is a writer on a wide variety of topics, passionate about learning and helping people above all else. Holding a bachelor’s degree from Oakland University, PJ enjoys using a lifelong desire to understand how things work to write about subjects that inspire interest. Most of PJ’s free time is spent reading and writing. PJ is also a regular writer at Bora.