03 July 2025
Zeki Turedi, Field CTO, EMEA, CrowdStrike
Cyber adversaries continuously pose new and highly sophisticated threats that evolve beyond the capabilities of legacy security solutions — a fact that IT decision-makers cannot afford to ignore. Modern attacks demand advanced solutions, yet traditional tools available to security operations centre (SOC) teams are increasingly ill-equipped to meet these demands.
This reality underscores an urgent need to adapt and future-proof legacy security information and event management (SIEM) tools. By leveraging the latest technologies, SOC teams can improve and streamline their operations. However, such a transformation takes time — which ultimately benefits threat actors.
Security decision-makers must recognise the growing capabilities of today’s adversaries and prioritise the modernisation of their organisation’s SOCs. Starting this necessary transition is the first step toward ensuring the integrity of organisational defences in 2025 and beyond.
SOC teams are being left behind
Today’s adversaries can infiltrate organisations at unprecedented speeds: the fastest recorded eCrime breakout in 2024 was just 51 seconds. But it’s not just speed that makes modern threats more dangerous. Attackers are becoming stealthier and increasingly imaginative in their methods. The stark reality is that as adversaries evolve, SOC teams risk being left behind.
Holding security teams back are legacy SIEMs, plagued by poor scalability and slow, manual security investigations. These outdated solutions diminish SOC effectiveness by flooding analysts with excessive, irrelevant, or duplicate data, making it nearly impossible to cut through the noise and effectively respond to threats.
Adding to the challenge, SOC teams struggle with the exponential increase in data volumes. Legacy SIEMs, with their outdated billing models based on ingest data volume, force security teams into a difficult trade-off: prioritise budget or security. This economic constraint limits their ability to log and retain critical data, creating security blind spots that adversaries can exploit.
A connected approach
If SOC teams are to keep pace with today’s adversaries, they need tools that match the speed, scale, and intelligence of modern threats — not outdated solutions that hinder their ability to detect and respond effectively. The answer is a next-gen SIEM that takes a connected approach to security operations, converging data, AI, and workflow automation into a unified cybersecurity platform.
Next-gen SIEMs address many of today’s unique SOC challenges, particularly data ingestion and storage, by having critical security data built in from the start as part of a unified security platform. As a result, security teams no longer need to spend countless cycles on data onboarding, allowing them to operationalise security insights immediately.
If data is the heart of SIEM, then detection content is the brain. With AI-powered detections, next-gen SIEMs are smarter than their legacy counterparts, enriching data and correlating it with comprehensive threat intelligence and security telemetry from endpoints, identities, workloads, and more. By putting data into a risk and security context, analysts receive higher-fidelity, more actionable alerts, cutting through noise and eliminating the endless false positives that plague traditional SIEMs.
Unleashing the power of the SOC team
SOC teams are already reaping the benefits of streamlined security operations by adopting modern technologies like next-gen SIEMs. These advancements help security professionals cut through digital noise, reduce false positives, and accelerate investigations, leading to faster and more precise threat detection.
Across the SOC, employees working with next-gen SIEM experience significant gains in efficiency. Security analysts can leverage automated workflows to streamline incident response and analyse threats at unprecedented speed. Meanwhile, with rapid search speeds compared to legacy SIEMs, threat hunters can search for adversaries and incidents faster, allowing them to proactively uncover threats before they escalate.
Unlike traditional SIEMs, which rely on manual processes and static rules, next-gen SIEM’s AI-native approach continuously adapts to evolving threat patterns, uncovering sophisticated attacks that might otherwise go undetected. Integrating a next-gen SIEM empowers security teams to shut down adversaries at unrivaled speeds while simultaneously reducing overall SOC costs.
Beyond operational efficiency, implementing these technologies has been shown to significantly reduce security costs, namely data ingest — a crucial factor as many SOC teams operate under tight budgets and limited staffing. By embracing next-gen SIEM, SOCs can achieve more with fewer resources, strengthening security without increasing operational burden.
SOC transformation: A non-negotiable imperative
As attackers grow faster and employ sophisticated tactics, including malware-free and identity-based attacks, fragmented security tools are becoming a liability. These disjointed systems create blind spots and waste valuable time, a luxury that SOC analysts can’t afford in the face of modern threats.
To keep pace, SOC teams must embrace more agile, integrated solutions that enhance efficiency and accelerate response. While transitioning to a modern security architecture takes time, the benefits far outweigh the effort. Moving forward, adopting a modern, AI-driven SOC approach will be essential to stay ahead of evolving threats and ensure operational resilience.
