AI-powered SOCs: Redefining the future of cyber defence

In an era where digital threats evolve faster than defences, the Security Operations Centre (SOC) has emerged as the nerve centre of an organisation’s cybersecurity posture. It unites people, processes, and technologies to monitor, detect, and respond to threats in real time—ensuring operational resilience and business continuity. As adversaries weaponise artificial intelligence (AI) and deepfakes, the SOC is no longer a support function but a strategic command hub for proactive defence and intelligence.

Observed every October, Cybersecurity Awareness Month underscores the urgency of such preparedness. The 2025 theme, “Secure Our World – Stay Safe Online,” reiterates that cyber safety is a shared responsibility among governments, enterprises, and individuals. At the heart of this collaboration lies the SOC—an environment where every millisecond counts and each decision determines whether an organisation stays ahead or falls behind in its cybersecurity posture.

SOCs Take Centre Stage in 2025

As the control tower of cybersecurity, the SOC enables the convergence of human expertise and automation to identify, analyse, and neutralise threats. In 2025, its importance spans large enterprises, government entities, and mid-sized organisations alike. With the growing sophistication of AI-driven attacks and weaponised deepfakes, continuous vigilance is no longer optional. The SOC has become the foundation of digital trust and business resilience.

However, as the threat landscape expands, SOCs are under immense pressure. The very model that served enterprises for years—tiered analysts manually filtering the signal from the noise—has reached its limits. Mounting alert fatigue, skill shortages, and data overload now threaten to undermine the SOC’s effectiveness.

The Crisis Inside Traditional SOCs

Shortage of skilled talent and burnout: Traditional SOCs are struggling to keep pace with the digital deluge. Analysts face a relentless flow of false positives, fragmented intelligence, and manual investigation workflows. The median time to respond (MTTR) remains a staggering 12 hours—unacceptable in today’s real-time threat environment.

Research shows that one-third of SOC analysts admit to ignoring alerts during high-volume periods, leading to missed threats and heightened risk. According to a Tines report, 63% of SOC practitioners report burnout, and many security leaders face growing regulatory and reputational exposure due to delayed responses.

Exponentially growing attack surface: The attack surface is expanding rapidly as connected devices and cloud-based systems proliferate. TechJury estimates that by 2030, more than 25.4 billion Internet of Things devices will be online, each representing a potential vulnerability. Organisations must defend these endpoints while complying with stringent data protection regulations and coping with limited security resources.

Growing data demands: With every new device and application, SOCs must process exponentially larger volumes of data. Legacy SIEM systems are struggling to scale. Analysts often work with multi-tiered data architectures—as hot, warm, and cold storage—with varying retrieval times.

Investigating a months-old breach often requires rehydrating data from cold storage, a time-consuming process that delays response. According to ThoughtLabs, the average time to detect a breach is 128 days, underscoring how fragmented data slows investigation and remediation efforts.

Adversaries Weaponise Artificial Intelligence

AI has transformed not only how defenders operate but also how attackers strike. Generative AI and large language models are now being used to automate reconnaissance, vulnerability scanning, and malware creation. These technologies empower threat actors—both skilled and unskilled—to launch complex campaigns with unprecedented speed and precision.

Phishing and social-engineering attacks are increasingly hyper-personalised, exploiting behavioural and social data harvested online. Deepfake-enabled deception has blurred the line between reality and manipulation. The fusion of human ingenuity with machine speed has rendered legacy SOC defence models reactive and obsolete. To regain control, enterprises must reinvent their SOCs to match adversaries’ use of automation with intelligence of their own.

AI-Powered SOCs Enable Proactive Defence

AI-driven attacks demand AI-powered defences. The future-ready SOC must operate as an intelligent, autonomous ecosystem that continuously learns, adapts, and acts. This shift requires a move towards AI-native SOC platforms—where decision-making is accelerated, contextual, and precise.

At the core of this transformation is Agentic AI, a framework of multiple autonomous intelligent agents, each specialised in tasks across the threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR) lifecycle. These agents collaborate with human analysts, perceive patterns, prioritise critical alerts, and automate routine responses. The result is a quantum leap in both accuracy and speed, allowing human expertise to focus on strategic decision-making rather than manual triage.

By combining autonomous detection, predictive analytics, and intelligent orchestration, AI-native SOCs enable faster incident containment, improved mean time to detect (MTTD), and significantly lower operational costs. Automation ensures that mundane tasks are handled efficiently while analysts focus on evolving threat patterns and strategic defence planning.

The Intelligent SOC: Guardian of Digital Trust

As cyber threats continue to escalate, the SOC’s mission extends beyond monitoring and response—it becomes the guardian of digital trust. The modern SOC is not defined by more dashboards, alerts, or analysts, but by intelligent agency—distributed, autonomous, explainable, and collaborative.

AI-empowered SOCs mark the transition from reactive security to proactive intelligence, enabling organisations to anticipate and prevent breaches rather than respond to them. As the digital economy expands and interconnected systems multiply, only those that invest in intelligent, automated SOCs will remain resilient against the evolving threat landscape.

Cybersecurity resilience in 2025 depends not just on awareness but on intelligence in action—where SOCs evolve from backroom defence units into the strategic command centres of secure digital enterprises.

The author is the Vice President for APJ, India, Middle East, and Africa at Securonix.