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Meet the Modern SOC
Where Artificial Intelligence Meets Human Analysis
JUMP TO: INTRO | BANDWITH VS BRAINPOWER | SYNERGY | THE RIGHT ROLE
Modern Security Operations Centers (SOCs) face more data, more noise and more sophisticated threats than ever before, as the scale, scope and increase of security platforms and systems increases. What used to be managed by humans with rule sets and manual triage now demands a whole new level of scale, speed and precision.
From that perspective, the rise of artificial intelligence comes at a great time for the cybersecurity industry. But the best teams have quickly realized the best way to leverage AI isn’t as a solo act. It tends to work best when combined with human intuition.
Bandwidth vs Brainpower
Inversion6 CTO Chris Prewitt has seen the industry shift firsthand. In the early days, detection engineering was both an art and a science. Analysts wrote rules by hand, watching for patterns, tuning alerts and spending hours trying to separate real threats from background noise. Incident response teams were also incredibly helpful monitoring the airwaves for new novel threats.
"You’d set everything up. Then you’d get an alert and you’d have to dig," Prewitt recalled. "Is this person really logging in from the Philippines? Are they on vacation? Is this a trusted device? There was a ton of back-and-forth."
The issue isn’t the skill; it’s the scale. Even the best human analyst can only do so much. Even the best traditional SOC will struggle to keep up with the explosion of data coming from today’s cloud, identity and endpoint sources.
"People just can’t work in parallel the way AI can," said Prewitt. "When humans are doing detection in real-time, there’s a whole world of data you don’t even try to monitor because you don’t have the bandwidth—or the time."
Modern security tools like Gurucul with built in AI fundamentally change the math. These systems can ingest and analyze enormous volumes of telemetry, identifying anomalies across disparate systems in seconds. That makes them ideal for potential threat detection.
Like other pieces of the AI revolution, Prewitt points out these advances work best when they refocus human priorities rather than replacing humans entirely.
“Think of it like writing,” he said. “You used to start with a blank page. Now, AI can give you 80% of a draft instantly. So, the creative piece is now distilled down to that last 20 percent. It’s the same thing in our SOC. But now the validation by humans is even more important.”
"Instead of spending hours digging through whatever amount of raw data you can grab from the firehouse, AI can ingest all of it instantly and say, 'Hey, here’s something suspicious.'” Prewitt added. "Then a talented human analyst can come in and do what talented humans do—read the nuances, develop the execute appropriate response and communicate the entire process to other humans.”
Synergy by the Numbers
By some estimates, A SOC that combines AI detection with human response can cut overall data ingestion costs by nearly 90 percent, while also filtering out up to 99 percent of false positives.
This kind of efficiency offers all sorts of benefits. It can be used to right-size your budget, or scale up your coverage to protect your growth without breaking the bank.
But the biggest benefit of all doesn’t really show up until trouble arrives.
“The real value of AI is the gift of time," Prewitt emphasized, "In an active threat scenario, you can shave hours off an investigation and dramatically reduce response times. That can make all the difference between a close call and a costly cybersecurity incident.”
The Right Roles for Success
At Inversion6, we believe the best Security Operations Centers aren’t just replacing people with tech. They’re evolving into a model that let’s AI do what it does best—scale and speed—so people can do what they do best: interpret, decide and lead.
Step inside our modern SOC and you won’t see a room full of exhausted analysts staring at blinking dashboards. You’ll find a dynamic, scalable system where cutting edge AI handles the volume while experienced humans apply the analysis for rapid response when it matters most.
