Are more clients inquiring about cybersecurity services? With 69% of businesses planning to outsource cybersecurity to MSPs and MSSPs, there are tremendous opportunities to expand your offerings.

To deliver comprehensive security services, you must ensure your SOC is well-positioned to meet current and future market demands. Let’s review the top cybersecurity challenges you must address and explore the top trends and key tools to future-proof your MSP with holistic and proactive cybersecurity services.

Overcoming challenges in cybersecurity service delivery

The SOC of the future must address the challenges MSPs face as the cybersecurity landscape evolves:

• Information overload. SOC analysts are inundated with alerts and security data. Manually parsing through log files from multiple sources often causes errors and delays.

• Limited visibility. Siloed SOC technologies increase the challenges of detecting and responding to threats, especially in a multi-cloud environment.  

• Lack of automation. Many MSPs rely on manual processes, which result in delays in detecting and responding to threats. Yet, they don’t have the tools and expertise to automate workflows.

• Talent shortage. The ongoing labor shortage in the industry increases operating costs, causes burnout and turnover, and impacts a SOC’s effectiveness.

• Evolution of security threats. Challenges concerning fast-evolving threats multiply when a SOC with a fragmented toolset needs to update various software to stay current. 

What the SOC of the future looks like

Let’s explore the key trends and tools to help you navigate this shifting landscape. These top trends will shift security operations as we know it. They address many of today’s challenges and ensure MSPs have the necessary capabilities to meet customer demand.

Holistic SOC solutions take center stage

As the industry matures, we see the convergence of tools, techniques, and tactics to increase visibility and address the proliferation of data, alerts, and siloed software. For example, many big players buy up smaller brands to fill gaps in their solutions, and tools like Stellar Cyber‘s XDR (Extended Detection & Response) platform allow MSPs and MSSPs to consolidate capabilities into a single-pane-of-glass view.

Meanwhile, decreased threat actor dwell time requires SOCs to shift from an “ingest, analyze, alert, research, and respond/block” sequence to a “detect, confirm, block, alert, research, and relieve block” workflow — putting SOC functions directly in the kill chain. As such, a SOC solution must have the authority and technical capabilities to disrupt potentially malicious behaviors at multiple levels, including endpoints, emails, cloud IaaS/PaaS, and networks. 

AI and machine learning technologies will take data analytics in cybersecurity to the next level. SOC solutions will augment contextual awareness by incorporating various inputs, including cloud, endpoints, communications, user actions, and even social media data. These platforms also capture changes in behaviors and sentiments to predict actions and stay ahead of incidents.

AI technologies support proactive cybersecurity

AI and machine learning (ML) applications will perform tedious and time-consuming tasks like triage, log analysis, and basic threat hunting. Security experts expect AI to automate over 70% of these tactics and other preventive measures, freeing human experts to focus on strategic decisions, advanced threat analytics, and interpreting outliers beyond computational understanding.

Experts also anticipate that “cyber self-healing” will become a prominent component in proactive maintenance to automate system patching and remediation and identify configuration errors or potential vulnerabilities. Additionally, AI may improve client communication by creating detailed reports, helping MSPs demonstrate the value they deliver to improve customer retention.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) will integrate generative AI (GenAI) to solve talent shortage challenges and address outstanding demand for analyst hours. Software may also leverage AI and ML technologies to implement statistical modeling to establish environment baselines and identify anomalies, minimizing manual work and shortening response time.

Human expertise remains critical

Most cybersecurity experts agree that although AI and ML applications will be indispensable, human expertise will be required to monitor, tune, and retrain AI models to avoid overtraining, bias, malicious adversarial training, and hallucinations. While technology may help simplify level-one analyst responsibilities, SOCs are not ready to become fully autonomous because of the complex nature of security processes.

Human oversight is essential for maintaining high standards and ensuring checks and balances. Human analysts also provide critical contextual awareness and decision-making capabilities AI systems cannot replicate. For example, they may assess the broader business implications of a threat, weigh competing priorities, and make judgment calls in nuanced scenarios where automation falls short. Such input goes beyond technical accuracy to align actions with an organization’s strategic goals.

Additionally, skilled analysts can identify emerging attack patterns, develop countermeasures, and improve AI models through feedback and manual tuning. For many MSPs, a SOC as a Service (SOCaaS) solution using AI technology backed by human expertise is the most cost-effective way to get the best of both worlds without the high costs and complexity.

A security toolset of the future

Include these in your security toolset to future-proof your SOC:

• Generative AI, such as Microsoft Copilot, automates routine security tasks and orchestrates disparate security platforms. For example, you may analyze security logs analyze issues, and reduce false positives.

• Cloud-native security  tools monitor multi-cloud environments and automatically apply or adjust security policies when these environments change or scale.

• Threat intelligence platforms aggregate threat intelligence from multiple sources and automatically correlate the information with internal logs to identify vulnerabilities.

• AI-powered SIEM solutions offer real-time adaptive intelligence, allowing SOC teams to respond to known threats and anticipate potential risks based on trends.

• Open XDR platforms connect various security tools and provide a unified view to help security experts follow incidents across a network, identify compromised assets, block malicious traffic, and quarantine infected systems. 

• Deception technology introduces active defenses like fake assets or decoys to gather intelligence on attackers while protecting real assets.

Ensure your MSP is future-proof with a robust SOCaaS solution

Staying ahead of the latest SOC technologies is capital- and labor-intensive. But you don’t have to do it all on your own. A robust SOCaaS solution, like enhanced.io’s packages, provides you with cutting-edge technology and human expertise to remain relevant in the fast-evolving security landscape without the high investment of building a SOC from scratch.

Additionally, our flexible “Build your own SOC” model meets you where you are — you can use our 24/7 SOC, plug in your own SOC, or expand your team with our staffing solution. Get in touch to explore how our SOCaaS solution can help you scale and grow with enterprise-grade cybersecurity.