Security Operations Centers (SOCs) were designed for yesterday’s threats. In 2025, leaders face new realities:
The numbers speak for themselves:
As highlighted in recent Netenrich CISO Roundtables, the traditional SOC is reaching a breaking point. Leaders are realizing that SecOps must evolve from tool-driven workflows to data-driven, outcome-oriented security strategies.
Where SOCs Fail
Most SOCs treat alert noise as the enemy. But buried in the “noise” are often the first faint signs of compromise. The challenge isn’t fewer alerts - it’s better signals.
How CISOs Solve It:
Think of it like airport security: not every beep at the scanner is dangerous, but you need a system smart enough to know when to pull someone aside.
With Netenrich Adaptive MDR Services, SOCs amplify meaningful signals and contextualize them in real time, ensuring critical threats don’t disappear in the static.
Where SOCs Fail
Too many SOCs chase KPIs that don’t matter - number of tickets closed, SLAs met - while missing the bigger picture: did we prevent business disruption?
Attendees at Netenrich’s recent CXO/CISO Roundtable agreed, “SOCs are failing because they focus on reacting to incidents rather than proactively mitigating risks. They need to shift left and address threats earlier in the kill chain.”
How CISOs Solve It
Outcome-driven SOCs shift the conversation from “how busy are we?” to “how safe are we?”
Adaptive MDR™ does this by engineering data, detection, and response together so leaders can demonstrate resilience to boards and regulators.
Where SOCs Fail
Hybrid and multi-cloud adoption is now the rule, not the exception. Unfortunately, most SOCs still monitor them with siloed, legacy workflows. According to Radware, 69% of companies that have multi-cloud architectures have reported data breaches.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, more than 85% of organizations will have adopted a cloud-first strategy, but 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.
How CISOs Solve It
Netenrich’s partnership with Google Cloud brings this together, powering Adaptive MDR™ with SecLMs and advanced AI to strengthen defenses across the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
Where SOCs Fail
Every major breach report has the same theme: attackers were inside for weeks - sometimes months - before discovery as evidenced by the 2020 U.S. Federal Government breach*, wherein attackers gathered intelligence for months before executing data exfiltration.This reactive approach compromises security and undermines long-term resilience, especially with limited data retention often capped at three months, making it difficult to detect long-term threats involving lateral movement or dormancy.
How CISOs Solve It
With Adaptive MDR Solutions, organizations move left in the kill chain - catching threats early and focusing human talent on the issues that matter.
Where SOCs Fail
Manual triage workflows in cybersecurity create bottlenecks. Without automation, security analysts must review, prioritize, and investigate alerts while sifting through high volumes of security notifications, identifying false positives, and determining real threats. This process is time-consuming, prone to human error, and slows response times, often leading to alert fatigue and missed critical threats.
As cyberattacks grow more sophisticated, manual triage becomes unsustainable. Also, as organizations adopt more complex technology infrastructures, the limitations of manual processes become even more apparent.
How CISOs Solve It
AI isn’t here to replace humans - it’s a co-pilot. Routine tasks get automated so your experts can focus on judgment calls and strategic outcomes.
Netenrich’s Data-Driven SecOps and ActOns framework make this shift real, delivering prioritized recommendations CISOs can trust.
Boards don’t ask how many alerts your SOC processed last quarter. They ask how secure the business is.
By adopting modern SOC strategies - signal enrichment, AI augmentation, cloud resilience, proactive hunting, and automation - CISOs can finally answer with confidence.
If your SOC is stuck in the past - reactive, ineffective, and low-performing - it’s time to move forward.
Stop firefighting. Start driving outcomes.
The top SOC best practices include reducing alert fatigue, integrating AI-driven insights, strengthening cloud security, adopting proactive detection models, and automating manual triage.
Key SOC challenges include alert overload, cloud complexity, siloed tools, high data breach costs, and reliance on manual triage workflows.
AI enhances SOC solutions by contextualizing alerts, detecting anomalies in real time, and automating investigations, allowing analysts to focus on high-priority threats.
SOC strategies are the overarching approaches (like proactive detection models), while SOC solutions are the tools and frameworks (like AI-driven SecOps platforms) that enable those strategies.
*Sources: