If cyber defense wasn’t already a stressful job, the introduction of AI has added both excitement and complexity along with additional stress. Recent data reveals 50% of security leaders and practitioners likely plan to quit or are considering leaving their role in the next 12 months. The AI era has transformed the capabilities of threat actors, allowing them to produce AI-powered attacks that are faster and on a larger scale. This has left cyber defenders even more on their heels, creating a perpetual state of reactivity to the latest cyber threats. The answer to these new normal lies in the power of AI agents. A security operations center (SOC) that embraces Agentic AI can unlock transformative capabilities designed for the challenges of the AI age.
A burnt-out SOC
Today’s security leaders are likely considering leaving because of the way they now spend their time. Almost half, 46% of cybersecurity pros, spend more time wrangling tools than stopping threats. Moreover, 59% say it’s the main source of inefficiency for their teams. Certain tooling even contributes to too many alerts and disjointed workflows. This tool sprawl may be due to the existence of legacy tooling — that doesn’t integrate with modern technology — or point solutions that were implemented without much thought on the overall IT environment.
When a SOC is burnt out due to alert fatigue and other maintenance-related work, its cyber defenders are forced to eschew their passion for solving and anticipating real security threats. Moreover, if this burnout continues, that passion could fade, leading to a less motivated SOC. A less motivated SOC is a less focused SOC. A less focused SOC could lead to security deficiencies that are dangerous for an entire IT system and a business’s bottom line.
Bringing the SOC into the Next Age of AI
A future-ready SOC can help cyber teams reduce manual workloads, streamline operations, and restore some of the passion that made them defenders in the first place. It’s important for cyber defenders to audit and tune the AI tooling they may already have. Depending on the security tools present in their SOC, they may have AI features capable of creating immediate efficiencies in workflows.
Next, define explicit roles for humans and AI within those workflows. This will help to analyze where AI agents can remove some of that maintenance work, such as prioritizing alerts, and return defenders back to the work they’re passionate about. It is important to note that, with agentic AI’s ability to take autonomous action, cyber teams should look to start small before scaling agents throughout SOC workflows. Try alert clustering, incident prioritization, or enriching tickets with proper context as good first steps to testing agentic assistance within workflows.
In these early stages, regular audit of AI will be important to audit how AI Agents perform. The earlier teams create ways for intervention and correction, the less time they will spend correcting potential AI mistakes. Intervention can take multiple forms, but will likely include improved prompts and/or better, cleaner, more relevant data upon which the AI agents can act.
Staying Safe and Secure in the Agentic SOC
The cornerstone of an Agentic SOC is the implementation of safety and security policies. As with any AI-related initiative, improper guidelines or safety measures can cause AI to produce more problems than it solves. The adoption of AI can also introduce new attack vectors, including API security vulnerabilities, data poisoning, model manipulation, privilege escalation, and data exfiltration.
While creating defined roles helps AI agents streamline tasks, it also allows cybersecurity leaders to ensure humans are in the most sensitive workflows and can act if AI systems make a mistake. It’s important that humans, in some fashion, stay close to all AI workflows, but especially actions such as security policy changes or user lockouts.
Equally important is data governance in AI operations. Security leaders must balance AI’s appetite for data with guardrails and policies that are in line with relevant regulations and privacy standards. This ensures AI within not only the SOC, but throughout the organization.
Getting Back to Business with the Agentic SOC
When cyber defenders tap into the possibilities of the Agentic SOC, they not only level the playing field in the new cybersecurity landscape, but they also revitalize their teams to focus on the mission of cyber defense. The Agentic SOC will help reverse the burnout trend that sees almost half of security leaders wanting to exit their roles. It will also take defenders’ attention away from manual, tedious maintenance work, and give them a chance to rediscover their passion for the industry. With the right safety measures in place, the modernized, agent-powered SOC will allow security leaders to confidently prepare for the next shift in the cybersecurity landscape.
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