Achieving 24/7 SOC (Security Operations Center) coverage is tough, but essential. Cyberattacks are unrelenting and opportunistic, often occurring during off-hours or weekends when human defenses are thinnest. Yet, despite its importance, around-the-clock coverage remains one of the most significant challenges SOC managers and directors face.
The primary obstacle? Staffing. Building and maintaining a team capable of seamless 24/7 operations is often prohibitively expensive and operationally difficult, leaving most SOCs with gaps during late-night and weekend shifts. However, the advent of AI SOC analysts offers a way to make 24/7 coverage more feasible even for resource-constrained organizations. These AI-driven agents operate tirelessly, autonomously performing investigations and dramatically increasing coverage during late-night hours without the challenges of hiring, retaining, and managing human analysts.
The Critical Importance of 24/7 SOC Coverage
Modern cybersecurity requires constant vigilance. Threat actors increasingly leverage automation and advanced tactics to execute attacks, often targeting organizations during their least prepared hours. Statistics highlight this urgency:
- Attack Speed: Cyberattacks, such as ransomware, can escalate from initial compromise to exfiltration in a matter of hours, sometimes minutes. In many cases, attackers exfiltrate data within six hours of gaining access.
- Delayed Responses: Without 24/7 monitoring, critical alerts can languish in queues for hours before they are looked at. Each hour increases the risk of irreparable damage, such as data breaches or operational disruptions.
Real-world examples underline the risks of gaps in SOC coverage. In a case study of a financial institution, attackers used a weekend phishing campaign to exploit credentials and bypass multi-factor authentication. With no overnight staff to detect unusual login behavior, the attackers accessed sensitive systems for over 24 hours before being discovered. The fallout: compromised data, regulatory fines, and long-term reputational damage.
The Challenges of Staffing a 24/7 SOC
For SOC managers, achieving 24/7 coverage is a logistical, financial, and operational headache. It boils down to three key challenges:
- The Cybersecurity Skills Gap: Globally, the industry faces a shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals. With over 3.4 million unfilled positions in 2023, SOC teams often struggle to hire enough qualified analysts for standard shifts, let alone night or weekend coverage. It’s a demanding job that’s tough to fill.
- Analyst Burnout: The repetitive nature of tier-one SOC tasks—triaging alerts, filtering false positives, and executing low-level investigations—leads to high levels of fatigue and turnover. Late-night shifts and changing schedules exacerbate this problem, disrupting sleep schedules and increasing stress levels, not to mention making personal planning difficult.
- Budget Constraints: Staffing a SOC for 24/7 operations requires rotating shifts, meaning a single role must often be filled by three to four individuals to ensure consistent coverage. For many organizations below the cybersecurity poverty line, this level of investment is unattainable, especially when faced with budget constraints or competing priorities.
These obstacles create a vicious cycle: insufficient staffing leads to burnout, which increases turnover, which further reduces staffing levels, leaving SOCs even more vulnerable to gaps in coverage.
AI SOC Analysts: An Affordable Solution to 24/7 Coverage
AI SOC analysts are autonomous, tireless agents designed to solve the staffing challenge and extend the capabilities of human teams. Unlike traditional SOC staffing models, AI-driven systems provide a scalable and cost-effective solution for achieving true 24/7 coverage.
AI Never Sleeps
Unlike human analysts, AI operates tirelessly around the clock, providing consistent monitoring and alert triage. Whether it’s a phishing attempt late on a Friday night or unusual activity detected over a holiday weekend, AI ensures no threat goes uninvestigated. This uninterrupted coverage eliminates gaps often left by traditional staffing models, allowing organizations to maintain constant vigilance against evolving threats.
Automated Triage and Investigations
AI SOC analysts excel at automating tier-one tasks, streamlining the initial stages of security alert investigations. From enriching indicators of compromise (IOCs) with threat intelligence to gathering evidence and producing decision-ready reports, these systems replicate the reasoning of human analysts. This ensures that even high volumes of alerts during off-hours are processed quickly and thoroughly.
Human-AI Collaboration
Rather than replacing human analysts, AI SOC analysts work alongside them to improve overall efficiency. A single night-shift analyst, for instance, can handle far more alerts when supported by AI, focusing their expertise on high-priority or complex incidents. This collaboration lightens the load on SOC teams while ensuring that both routine and advanced tasks are handled effectively.
Cost Efficiency
Deploying AI SOC analysts significantly reduces the financial burden of maintaining a 24/7 SOC. Instead of hiring multiple analysts to cover night shifts and weekends, AI scales seamlessly with the organization’s needs and makes it possible for just a few human staff to efficiently deal with high alert volumes. This makes continuous coverage accessible even for organizations operating within tight budget constraints.How
AI SOC Analysts Increase SOC Efficiency
Beyond providing 24/7 coverage, AI SOC analysts transform SOC operations in several ways:
- Filtering Out False Positives: SOCs often drown in a flood of false-positive alerts. AI systems, like Dropzone AI, filter out noise by cross-referencing alerts with contextual and historical data and mark false positives as benign along with findings that a human can review. This reduces the workload on human analysts, allowing them to focus on genuine threats instead of wasting time on alerts that don’t matter.
- Accelerating Response Times: Automated investigations mean alerts are processed within minutes of hitting the queue rather than hours. For instance, Dropzone AI autonomously triages alerts within 3–11 minutes, far faster than the 20–40 minutes it typically takes human analysts. In addition, the Dropzone AI SOC analyst will get started on incoming alerts immediately, reducing the mean time to acknowledge (MTTA).
- Improving Investigation Consistency: Unlike human analysts, whose performance can vary due to fatigue or experience levels, AI ensures consistent, thorough investigations. Dropzone AI leverages methodologies like the OSCAR investigative framework to standardize processes across all alerts.
- Scalability: As organizations grow and alert volumes increase, AI SOC analysts scale effortlessly. They can handle hundreds of simultaneous investigations without requiring additional headcount or infrastructure.
The Benefits of AI-Driven 24/7 SOC Coverage
SOC managers who adopt AI SOC analysts see measurable benefits across their operations:
- Operational Efficiency: By automating routine tasks, AI allows analysts to focus on strategic initiatives like policy updates, incident response planning, and threat modeling.
- Team Morale: AI reduces the burden of repetitive work, leading to less burnout and higher job satisfaction among SOC teams.
- Enhanced Security Posture: Continuous, real-time investigations prevent threats from slipping through the cracks during off-hours, ensuring comprehensive coverage.
- Streamlined Compliance: AI systems generate audit-ready reports automatically, simplifying regulatory compliance efforts.
Real-World Use Cases for AI in SOC Operations
AI SOC analysts are transforming the way security operations centers manage threats by addressing specific challenges that are otherwise resource-intensive and time-consuming. Their ability to work tirelessly, analyze vast amounts of data in real time, and produce actionable insights has made them indispensable for modern SOCs. Let’s explore some of the most impactful use cases where AI-driven solutions like Dropzone AI shine.
Phishing Mitigation
Phishing remains one of the most prevalent and successful attack vectors, with countless organizations falling victim to cleverly disguised emails designed to steal credentials or deliver malicious payloads. For a traditional SOC, analyzing every phishing alert—especially during off-hours—can be daunting. AI SOC analysts handle this challenge head-on by triaging phishing alerts automatically.
When a suspicious email or link triggers an alert, the AI immediately enriches the associated indicators of compromise (IOCs) with threat intelligence but goes much further: It analyzes email headers, email content, attachment metadata, and landing pages for known malicious patterns. In real-world deployments, AI has been able to identify and flag highly targeted phishing attempts that bypass traditional filters.
For example, when a phishing email impersonated a company executive to request sensitive financial information, the AI detected inconsistencies in the sender’s metadata and flagged the alert for immediate escalation.
This rapid analysis and escalation ensure that even complex phishing campaigns are addressed before they can cause significant damage. By processing phishing alerts autonomously, AI not only reduces the burden on analysts but also ensures a faster and more consistent response.
Cloud Security Monitoring
As organizations increasingly migrate their operations to the cloud, monitoring these environments for unauthorized access or suspicious activity has become critical. However, the sheer volume of logs and events generated by cloud services like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud makes manual monitoring impractical. AI SOC analysts excel in this area by continuously investigating even low-severity cloud alerts, identifying anomalies, and providing actionable insights in real time.
Consider a scenario where an unusual spike in API calls is detected in an AWS environment late at night. While traditional monitoring tools might flag the activity, they often leave the deeper investigation to human analysts. An AI SOC analyst takes this further by cross-referencing the activity with known threat intelligence, analyzing user behavior patterns, and identifying whether the API calls are linked to an unauthorized user or a compromised account. It can generate a comprehensive report detailing the findings, including recommendations for immediate remediation, such as revoking access or quarantining affected resources.
This capability is especially valuable in detecting lateral movement or insider threats, where traditional tools may struggle to connect the dots. By continuously monitoring cloud environments, AI ensures that suspicious activity is addressed swiftly, even during periods of low human staffing.
Incident Reporting and Compliance
One of the routine but important tasks a SOC analyst has to do is write report summaries in cases where a security incident occurred, even when the event did not have a large impact. Writing these reports—which may be necessary to meet compliance standards—is not usually an enjoyable activity. AI SOC analysts streamline this process by automatically generating incident reports as part of their investigation workflows.
These reports include a summary of the alert, detailed evidence logs, actions taken during the investigation, and recommendations for follow-up actions. For example, after detecting a ransomware attack in its early stages, an AI SOC analyst can compile a report outlining the attack vector, affected systems, and remedial actions taken, such as isolating infected endpoints. The report is formatted for immediate use, ensuring that SOC managers have the documentation needed to demonstrate compliance with frameworks like GDPR, PCI-DSS, or HIPAA.
What makes this process even more powerful is the consistency AI brings. Unlike human analysts, who may vary in their reporting style or overlook details due to fatigue, AI ensures that every report adheres to the same high standards, providing auditors and stakeholders with confidence in the organization’s security operations.
Threat Hunting
AI SOC analysts are not limited to reacting to alerts—they also empower SOC teams to proactively identify threats before they escalate. AI SOC analysts speed up threat hunting by enabling human analysts to ask questions in natural language and test threat-hunting hypotheses. The AI SOC analysts are pre-trained to expertly use security tools and can quickly formulate the necessary queries to gather data and answer questions. For example, they can find out when permissions for an AWS role changed or what the normal access pattern to a resource from a particular IP address.
This proactive capability reduces dwell time—the period between an attacker’s initial compromise and their detection—dramatically improving the organization’s overall security posture.
Why AI SOC Analysts Are the Future of Security Operations
The demand for 24/7 SOC coverage will only grow as cyber threats become more sophisticated and frequent. AI SOC analysts are uniquely equipped to meet this demand. Unlike human analysts, they operate without fatigue, consistently deliver high-quality results, learn and improve their accuracy by remembering details, and adapt to evolving threats.
For SOC managers and directors, AI SOC analysts represent more than a tactical improvement—they are a strategic investment in the future of security operations. By integrating AI into their SOCs, organizations can achieve the elusive goal of 24/7 coverage while optimizing costs and improving team performance.
Key Takeaways
- AI SOC analysts eliminate coverage gaps by triaging alerts 24/7.
- Dropzone AI reduces MTTC from hours to minutes, enabling faster incident resolution.
- Augmenting existing staff, AI scales cost-effectively, ensuring continuous coverage without burnout.
Augmenting Your SOC with AI
Achieving 24/7 SOC coverage is a daunting challenge, but it’s no longer an unattainable goal. With AI SOC analysts, SOC managers can bridge staffing gaps, reduce burnout, and enhance their team’s effectiveness. It’s time to rethink the way we approach security operations and embrace the power of AI-driven solutions to secure our organizations around the clock. If you’d like to learn how Dropzone AI can help your SOC, request a demo.
