Imagine sitting at your desk one day and suddenly receiving thousands of security alerts, all threatening to close the business. Some are serious and some are not, but you have no way of knowing. Oh, and by the way, you have only a few hours at best to decide which ones to address.
That sounds pretty stressful, right? Well, that’s exactly the situation security operations centre (SOC) teams face every single day. With multiple disparate tools, SOC teams are forced to make decisions with a fragmented view of their environment on thousands of security alerts every day. What’s more, an overwhelming volume of contextless alerts and relentless pressure to make the right decision for the business means that burnout among SOC analysts is now reaching crisis levels.
Why SOC teams are working on incomplete information
How SOC teams handle incidents and alerts is fairly routine. An alert first enters the SIEM or monitoring system, where a level one analyst checks its urgency. If needed, it’s escalated to a level two analyst for deeper investigation and testing. Complex cases may then be referred to specialists, such as identity or network experts, for resolution.
In theory, this is a repeatable process where alerts and incidents are handled by the right experts in good time. In reality, things look very different. While many SOC teams manage the intake process well, making informed decisions is often where it gets difficult.
Many SOCs are reliant on static alerts and are hampered by siloed signals and disconnected tools, each showing only one chapter of the whole story. As a result, the decision to escalate or contain often becomes guesswork, lengthening the process or leading to missed or uninvestigated alerts that could easily develop into a full-scale breach.
There’s also the added pressure that legacy SOC tools force teams to triage alerts that are false positives or benign. This takes them away from investigating alerts that could cause a real incident or causes them to incorrectly shut down the entire system. As a result, teams often hesitate before taking decisive action, and any delay is a gift to attackers.
How do we give SOC teams context?
Modern attacks don’t follow a single path. Some move fast and cause as much damage as quickly as possible, while others remain hidden for months or even years. But they all share one thing in common: exploiting the links between systems, identities, and data flows.
Traditional SOC tools often miss these connections, operating in silos and flagging isolated events without showing how they relate. To stop an attacker, we need to think like one, and that means thinking in terms of graphs.
Security graphs reveal how environments truly operate and how different workloads communicate. This shows SOC teams why events happened, and more importantly, what might happen next.
Security graphs are not a new concept, but the addition of AI makes them more important. It takes the security graph to the next step by providing much-needed context for individual threats, helping SOCs map out malicious activity, identify attacker connections and patterns, and focus on the real risks. This is what helps SOC teams figure out if a minor access pattern from a low-level alert is, in fact, innocuous or something much more dangerous.
With this added context, analysts can bring in the right experts more quickly and accelerate prioritisation. No longer are SOC teams running around blindly trying to fix every alert. Instead, they immediately see where to act and contain threats before they spread.
More importantly, SOC teams break out of the reactive cycle of constantly responding to alerts towards proactive containment, where they anticipate risks and close exploitable gaps before attackers can take advantage.
SOC teams already have too much data, and simply giving them more tools only makes the problem worse. What they really need is context. AI security graphs provide exactly that, showing how workloads relate to each other and what alerts to prioritise so teams can quickly triage and respond to alerts with confidence.
Raghu Nandakumara is the vice president of industry strategy at Illumio
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