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The End of the "Console Clicking" Era. How SOAR and Agentic AI Save Us from Digital Burnout
Published: 00:00 11/05/2025
Cyberbezpieczeństwo
Imagine a job where your "boss"—in this case, a computer system—screams at you several thousand times a day. Most of these screams are false alarms. Someone forgot their password, or someone else ran a port scanner because they were testing a new app. But you have to check every single one. Sounds like a recipe for instant burnout? Welcome to the world of a Security Operations Center (SOC) analyst.
Modern cybersecurity architecture has reached a tipping point. The "digital explosion" and migration to the cloud have caused the volume of alerts to exceed human cognitive capabilities. However, help is on the horizon, and it’s not just another cup of coffee, but a fundamental paradigm shift: SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) and the upcoming Agentic AI revolution.
Here is what you need to know about how automation is changing the rules of the game in 2025.
Chasing Ghosts Costs Us Millions
Let's start with a statistic that should send shivers down any CFO's spine. SOC analysts waste an average of 32 minutes verifying a single false alert. This phenomenon even has a name in the industry: "chasing ghosts."
This systemic overload leads to alert fatigue. Our brains simply shut down. It's not laziness; it's biology. The result? Staff desensitization and a very real risk that in all this noise, we will miss that one genuine breach. Therefore, SOAR is not a technological novelty for gadget lovers. It is a necessity to stop wasting human intellectual potential on mechanical work that a script can perform in milliseconds.
Brain vs. Muscle: The Difference Between SIEM and SOAR
A common mistake is confusing these two concepts. Imagine the human body. SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) is the detection brain. It collects signals from the eyes and ears, analyzes them, and says, "Hey, something burns here!" SOAR is the muscular and nervous system. It’s what automatically pulls your hand away before you even think "ouch."
Orchestration acts as an abstraction layer that "translates" alerts from one system into actions in another.
Thanks to this, an analyst doesn't have to log into 50 different consoles and copy data using the "copy-paste" method. They have a "Single Pane of Glass" before their eyes—one screen showing the full context without unnecessary noise.
Playbooks: How to Turn Hours into Seconds
The heart of SOAR lies in playbooks—response scenarios. This is where the ROI (Return on Investment) magic happens. Let's look at a phishing example.
In the "old world," an analyst receives a ticket, checks email headers, throws the URL into VirusTotal, waits for the result, then looks for who else received the email, writes to the mail server administrator to delete the message... This takes 45 minutes. With SOAR? The playbook does it all automatically. If it detects a threat, it executes a "Search and Purge"—hard deleting the malicious message from all employee mailboxes in the organization. Operation time? Under 60 seconds.
It looks even more impressive with Ransomware. Here, every minute means thousands of encrypted files. SOAR doesn't wait for a human. If the EDR detects an encryption process, the automation immediately isolates the host from the network, leaving only a tunnel for the administrator. A ruthless, machine-speed reaction.
Year 2025: The Arrival of Agentic AI
If traditional playbooks are a GPS guiding us along a strictly designated route (and getting lost when the road is closed), then Agentic AI (Autonomous AI Agents) is like an intelligent driver who knows the city like the back of their hand.
We are entering an era where rigid "If-This-Then-That" logic is no longer enough. The new generation of automation, predicted for 2025, is based on goals, not scripts. An AI Agent receives a task: "Investigate this process." It decides on its own what data to collect, what hypotheses to form, and how to verify them. It can adapt.
Traditional SOAR works like a GPS following a strictly set route—if the road is closed, the system might not know how to find a detour. Agentic AI acts like an autonomous, intelligent driver.
The Fear of "Blocking the CEO"
Implementing full automation is not just a technical challenge (the so-called API integration hell) but primarily a cultural one. There is a justified fear that the automaton will make a wrong decision and, for example, cut off the CEO's network access or stop a production line.
That is why, despite the AI revolution, the Human-in-the-loop model is still alive and well. The machine prepares the "case file," collects evidence, but the final "Isolate" button is pressed by a human. Building trust in the machine is a process that takes time.
What's Next?
Let's not fear that SOAR will take our jobs. The role of the "data sifter" analyst will disappear, that’s true. But in its place, the role of the Threat Hunter is born—a strategist who, instead of fighting a flood of logs, actively hunts for threats that are too subtle for automatons.
In 2025, automation ceases to be a tech novelty and becomes a strategic foundation. In a world of machine threats, we must defend ourselves at machine speed.
Aleksander
Sources:
- SIEM vs. SOAR: How SOC Tools Complement Each Other - CodiLime
- The Role of SOAR in Modern Security Operations | Google SecOps Explained
- Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024
- Agentic AI vs SOAR: What's the Real Difference? - GBHackers
- The Drawbacks of a SOAR - The New Stack
- 2025 cybersecurity trends: GenAI, cloud security and zero trust - Silicon Republic
About the Author
Aleksander Zębrowski
Chief Technology Officer at SecurHub.pl
PhD candidate in neuroscience. Psychologist and IT expert specializing in cybersecurity.
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