1. It’s really important to react fast.
Threats, such as ransomware, run fast to get to the data before someone can intervene. Two hours after the initial compromise, you might already see the dreaded ransom note. An AI analyst works instantaneously to find and validate threats enabling your team to react in minutes instead of hours.
2. That tool you ignore is a huge risk.
Every organization has a tool that is off in the corner, blinking away, that no one looks at anymore. If any of those blinks are an early indication of a breach, your day just got a whole lot worse. Having alerts of malicious activity and not responding to them is a surefire way to get insurance coverage reduced and raise the ire of regulators. An AI analyst provides you additional coverage (and piece of mind) knowing that everything that could be considered a cyber alert (of which there are thousands) is getting reviewed.
3. You can’t hire anyone.
No one is hiring anymore, so what you have is what you’ve got. Your team could easily be spending 20% of their peoples' time reviewing alerts, only to find 1 or 2 a month that actually mean anything. Furthermore, false positive alerts (i.e. the majority of alerts that flow through your system) take longer for an analyst to analyze. An AI analyst doing this first cut of investigations can take 95% or more of that analysis work away and now, your team has time for that prevention project which yields infinitely more ROI.
4. MSS and MDR don’t want to be your SOC.
If your MDR provider could figure out how to sell you services without giving you SOC monitoring, they would. Their value is access to high caliber engineering, forensics, testing and response talent as a shared service. To a service provider, alert triage is high cost and high risk. They are either too late or too noisy when it comes to letting you know about what’s happening in your environment and their reward for constantly missing expectations is the high cost and turnover of running a managed SOC. Adding an AI analyst to escalate activity you’re most interested in and send that back to your service provider allows them to more efficiently activate the best parts of their service. It also allows them to provide better overall incentive alignment that will lead to better long-term value for both parties.
5. The CIO wants to know that you’re using AI.
Sounds dumb, but when the mandate comes from your C-Suite that you need to remain innovative and find ways to use AI to gain efficiency, having already invested in an AI analyst will make you the person of the hour. It might even lead to a yes on that other initiative you’ve been wanting to run.
6. SOC leaders need to find a way to yes.
If you’re a SOC leader, you’ve almost certainly run blocking for your team when some IT group shows up and says we need the SOC to monitor all our failed logins or every SQL query. Without an AI analyst, the answer has to be a quick and resounding N.O. Your team doesn’t have the time nor the energy for that ask. Now imagine you can say “Sure, we’ll have our AI analysis look at those things and if anything ever comes up, we’ll let you know.” You might even get IT to say yes to that ask that’s been on their desks for months now in exchange.
7. Your company is on a shopping spree.
You might be one of those companies that sees buying other companies as a type of sport. For a security team, the prospect of having to take on another company’s alerts is daunting. Having an AI analyst that you can plug in and start sifting through your new friends' alerts can help you get a sense of what’s going on without redirecting a big portion of your team before you know you need to.
8. You're new to cyber, and you need an experience boost.
Bootstrapping anew SOC is a difficult process. You need to find people and they need to understand your tools, processes, and priorities. It can be hard as a leader of a new group to ensure your folks are spending their time on the right things. Having an AI analyst find the most interesting insights helps ensure that your team is seeing and reacting to the most important security events. Tools cost money, but peace of mind is priceless.
9. You want to keep good people.
You put in the time with the team to hire and develop real rock stars. Now, you want them to stay and drive your program to the next level. If you promote all your junior analysts, how will you afford to backfill their roles? Try hiring an AI cyber analyst into your tier one roles.
10. Because you’re a cool person, who likes cool stuff.
Four years from now, everyone will have an AI analyst in their SOC. Wouldn’t it be nice to be ahead of the curve and graciously accept those speaking gigs and free conference passes just to tell a room full of people how you did it?
