Opinionated analysis, guides, and expert takes from security operations practitioners.
Every AI SOC vendor says the technology augments analysts. Their own ROI math says something different. Theo Hartley breaks down why "augmentation" is doing commercial work rather than describing the product — and what the broken entry-level hiring pipeline tells you about where Tier 1 is actually headed.
I inherited a CyberArk rollout eighteen months in, vault live and compliance satisfied. When I asked what detection rules the team had built against the PAM logs in the SIEM, the answer was zero.
The CNAPP dashboard stayed green while an attacker with a stolen access key moved through three AWS accounts and touched 19 IAM principals. Prevention had nothing to flag because the login was legitimate, the permissions were real, and the only signal was runtime behavior.
The autonomous SOC demo cleared 40 curated alerts in under two minutes. Four hours into a real production queue on a Wednesday night, it had already stalled on a custom cloud detection, silently closed a dedup cluster, and skipped an alert that needed a Jira ticket to answer.
We shipped a hundred detections and the ATT&CK heatmap stayed green through fourteen broken rules, week-stale IOCs, and a log pipeline that had stopped exporting months earlier. Every failure traced to the same root: we treated detection engineering as rule writing and skipped the maintenance.
Most MDR vendors arrive at renewal with a polished QBR deck. Most customers arrive with nothing to push back with. That asymmetry is the whole game — and it's why flat escalation rates, unaudited closed verdicts, and a 2 AM analyst who knows nothing about your environment survive contract after contract. This piece is the counter-metric.
Sigma solved detection portability but not tuning, conversion fidelity, or cloud coverage. Where the format still delivers value and where teams over-rely on it.
An operator's take on MDR provider archetypes, response authority, automation depth, and breach warranties in 2026.
Cloud security monitoring for 3-5 person SOC teams: four pillars, co-managed MDR, telemetry strategy, and where most stacks fail.
Agentic security means two things. Practitioners need both. Here's the definitional work.
Explainability wins the demo. Auditability survives the audit. The three questions AI SOC buyers should add to their vendor scorecard.