Replacing the Human in a SOC with AI Can’t Beat Breakout Time

Attackers break out, move from initial access to lateral movement, in 29 minutes on average. The fastest on record is 27 seconds. Now count how long it takes a normal SOC to get eyes on the alert.

Telemetry gets collected. It goes to a log forwarder. It's normalized and ingested. A SIEM correlates it and fires a detection. A case is created and joins the analyst queue. Five hops, five to ten minutes each and only then does a human start investigating. The alert is at least half an hour old before triage begins. If a human analyst takes 30 minutes to triage, you’re now 60 minutes before the response can even start. The SOC has continuously evolved over the last 20 years, adding more capabilities, but each innovation has also added more latency. 

How can AI help? Most companies are just using it to speed up the human process. Instead of taking 30 minutes to triage, it might take 10 minutes. Now you’re talking about 40 minutes before response starts. While this can reduce analyst fatigue and even save tangible costs, it doesn’t alter the outcome. The pipeline is too slow — the attacker broke out at 29 minutes.

The SOC needs to be rebuilt from the ground up with machine speed in mind. Many of the tools in the environment have built-in intelligence and analytics that match or even rival SIEM capabilities. Modern EDR, cloud security, and identity platforms all natively highlight suspicious activity in the environment. These alerts shouldn't go through the same slow pipeline as raw telemetry; they should go straight to AI triage and response. Alert to triage to response in 20 minutes or less. This is what the SOC needs.

In order to deal with the speed of AI, the SOC needs to manage both the traditional data pipeline but also an alert one. The traditional one helps to cover any detection gaps from dedicated security tools while the alert one enables true machine speed detection and response.