To build or not to build a SOC?

For years, one of the most common questions I fielded as a Gartner analyst was: "Should we build our own SOC?" My answer back then was almost always a cautionary "Probably not."

However, as we head into 2026, the economics and operational feasibility of security operations have fundamentally shifted. The emergence of AI SOC Analysts has changed the equation so substantially that "building a SOC" is no longer the organizational impossibility it once was.

Here is why the old logic for recommending against a SOC is evolving, and how AI is making the in-house SOC dream a reality.

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The Old Reality: A Resource Drain and Perpetual Decay

In my Gartner papers (back in the late 2010's) I laid out the heavy requirements for a modern SOC. It wasn't just about monitoring alerts; a "good" SOC required a tight integration of threat intelligence, detection engineering, incident response, and threat hunting.

The resource requirements were staggering:

• The 24/7 Staffing Trap: To run a basic 24/7 operation, you needed a team of 8 to 12 people at a minimum just to keep "warm bodies in seats." In practice, once you accounted for vacations, training, and attrition, that number often climbed toward 20 or even 40 employees.
• The "SOC Decay": We often warned about the insidious reduction in effectiveness over time. Without massive, ongoing executive support, SOCs would stagnate, quality would drop, and talented analysts would leave due to the toil of manual alert triage.
• The SOAR Struggle: Organizations tried to automate using SOAR, but they found that writing and maintaining playbooks was a herculean, high-maintenance task that required its own dedicated team of specialists.

For most, the logic was simple: Outsource it. Managed Detection and Response (MDR) was good enough for most, even if it lacked the deep organizational context of an in-house team.

The Pivot: How AI SOC Technology Changes the Math

The AI SOC Analyst has moved the bar down. It is no longer a choice between a massive, expensive internal team or a generic, "cookie-cutter" service provider. Why?

24/7 Coverage Without the Attrition: The "3 AM breach" used to require a fully staffed night shift. Today, an AI SOC Analyst provides 24/7 triage and investigation at a far lower cost. By autonomously canceling the noise of routine alerts, the AI ensures that human analysts are only woken up for genuine, high-stakes threats.

Elevation Over Elimination: AI isn't here to fire the SOC team; it’s here to make a lean team perform like a massive one. By automating the collection of context (logs, endpoint data, user behavior), the AI reduces investigation times from minutes to seconds. This allows your human experts to stop acting as "data fetchers" and start acting as strategic defenders focused on threat intelligence and detection engineering.

Lowering the Maintenance Tax: Unlike traditional SOAR, which relies on brittle, manually-coded playbooks, AI SOC solutions use reasoning-driven engines. They can dynamically create investigative workflows based on the context of an alert, meaning you don't need a team of developers just to keep your automation running. Providing context is far simpler than before: Instead of playbook forks, periodically uploaded spreadsheets and allowlists, it's just a matter of providing simple, natural language explanations.

Should We Build It?

The answer is no longer a hard "no". It's still a "maybe", as some organizations would still be short of the resources needed for a SOC. If your entire IT team is 10 people, it's hard to justify a security operations “team”. But if you have the critical mass, with AI SOC technology, you can finally build a decentralized, agile architecture that prioritizes quality of expertise over quantity of data.

Are you ready to stop renting your security and start owning your defense? Request a demo of Prophet AI to see how it can augment your SOC and 10x your human capacity.