The Role of Automation in 24/7 Security Operations Centres

1. Introduction

The average human reaction time is approximately 0.25 seconds. The total time of ticket ticket creation, assignment, investigation, remediation, and closure isn’t so easy to quantify but it’s certainly not a quarter of a second. The best metric for ticket handling isn’t, speed, its accuracy. This is where humans excel.

That said, speed does matter. It matters because; You need to act quickly to contain genuine threats, and increased efficiency allows you to focus on more valuable work improving the Security Operations Centre (SOC).

The real issue is not human capability, it’s scale. Analysts are skilled, thoughtful investigators, but they are exposed to repetition and context switching. Eventually, this wears down even the most experienced professionals. Protecting people from burnout is not only good for them; it’s essential for resilience. The challenge is to ensure that people can focus on the work that requires their judgement, without being overwhelmed.

2. The Pressure on Modern SOCs

Modern SOCs are equipped to identify and respond to threats thanks to increased visibility and better tooling. There is a catch though, more visibility and tools mean more alerts and places to look when investigating. Especially before you get the chance to improve tooling through, baselining, tuning, etc.

To illustrate, assuming a perfect employee can handle one ticket every 20 minutes during an 8-hour shift, they can handle 24 tickets per shift. You are now covered from 9- 5, congratulations. What about out of hours, complex investigations, handovers? These are operational questions we must answer before we can approach improvement work (remember that?). Improvements reduce ticket count, but we can’t implement improvements because of ticket count!

The traditional answer “hire more people!” is difficult, and in my experience, unscalable. People are finite and expensive resources which carry their own complexities such as attrition and burn out. It is better to support the people you have than to expand the team. Additionally, attack speed doesn’t reduce with more employees.

3. How Automation Transforms 24/7 Security Operations

So, if we aren’t going to focus on hiring more people, what do we do? We embrace automation in SOC process. Doing so results in better outcomes, reduced ticket fatigue, and frees people in the SOC to perform the important improvements mentioned earlier.

One of the clearest automation opportunities lies in data consolidation. Without automation, analysts must pivot between tools. Using automation in the SOC to consolidate disparate data provides analysts the information they need without wasting time context switching. Embracing automation here enables your analysts to deliver high quality outcomes quicker.

Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) for incident response automation also reduces dependency on human reaction time post threat detection. Take a compromised user account. Containment involves revoking sessions, resetting passwords, and removing MFA methods, followed by checking what else the user did. Even a superhuman analyst working at average reaction speed, and a few seconds for page loads, takes several seconds. Still slower than automation though. SOAR performs all actions in less than a second giving you the edge against threats.

Perhaps the most important benefit is the time it frees for people. When repetitive triage, enrichment and correlation tasks are handled automatically, analysts have the space to perform the improvement work that reduces ticket volumes in the first place. breaking the cycle identified earlier allows the SOC to evolve rather than endure.

4. Balancing Automation with Human Expertise

Importantly, correct use of automation empowers analysts. As such, full automation is not the goal. Security still needs human judgement and contextual understanding. These are difficult to distil into SOAR playbooks. Particularly, humans understand nuance and apply their judgement where required. For example, containment decisions are binary in automation, but a human may know something which influences their decision.

Automation is best placed to take on repetitive or time-sensitive activities with predictable outcomes. This approach prevents burnout and gives people space to think strategically. Automation also encourages creativity in the SOC and provides opportunities for people to make contributions beyond closing tickets. Extra contributions include threat hunting and knowledge sharing.

A well-integrated automation programme also drives cultural improvement. Since analysts are supported by automation, they spend less time reconstructing context and more time collaborating. Teams begin to operate with confidence rather than urgency.

Ultimately, automation strengthens people by providing them space to perform at their best. The result is a SOC which is not only more efficient, but more resilient.

5. Real-World Benefits & Lessons Learned

Acumen Cyber’s experience operating a 24/7 SOC demonstrates how well implemented automation improves operations. When repetitive tasks are automated, staff perform other tasks which increase their job satisfaction and allows them to train to keep their skills sharp.

Automated containment drives our industry leading Mean Time to Contain (MTTC) by enabling the SOC to act at machine speed before breakout occurs.

Automation is fundamental to Acumen’s scalability and indeed for any growing organisation. As organisations expand and compliance requirements increase, automation ensures consistent execution of processes aligned with standards such as ISO 27001. This consistency strengthens audit readiness and maintains quality across all areas.

When starting your automation journey, you must actually start! Often, organisations plan to automate but never get round to it. Instead, they sacrifice improvement to resolve immediate problems. The easiest place to start is to evaluate the automation options in your existing toolsets and use them! Most modern tooling provides some level of automation.

Next, bring your data into single view, implement automated triaging and containment playbooks. Doing so will dramatically improve your analyst efficiency and MTTC. With these in place, you will be able to start working on more comprehensive automation for the organisation.

6. Conclusion

The aim of automation is to create space for people to do their best work, while raising the overall resilience and capability of the SOC.

Automation has reshaped how modern SOCs operate, but its greatest value lies in how it strengthens the people within them. By reducing repetitive tasks, and providing machine-speed containment, automation gives analysts the freedom to apply their effort and expertise where it matters most. Acumen Cyber’s experience shows that this balance creates a more resilient and scalable SOC, capable of meeting the demands of any organisation. The future of security operations is not fully autonomous. It is human led, automation-enhanced, and built for constant improvement.