From Alert Fatigue to Cyber Resilience: Rethinking the Future of the SOC with AI
Cybersecurity has a long memory—and an even longer list of recurring frustrations. Chief among them: alert fatigue. For as long as security teams have existed, they’ve been drowning in notifications, dashboards, and blinking red lights. Each new platform promises to separate signal from noise, and yet, years later, analysts are still buried under an avalanche of “critical” alerts that turn out to be anything but.
In the latest episode of the TechSpective Podcast, I sat down with Raghu Nandakumara, VP of Industry Strategy at Illumio, to explore why this problem refuses to die—and whether the rise of agentic AI could finally change the equation.
Raghu describes Illumio as a “breach containment company,” focused on limiting the damage when (not if) attackers break through. Their philosophy is simple but powerful: you can’t prevent every intrusion, but you can prevent the blast radius from spreading. That means reducing lateral movement risk—the ability for attackers to move freely once they’re inside a network—and building what he calls “true cyber resilience.”
But our conversation quickly veered into a broader question about the human side of the SOC (Security Operations Center). Analysts are expected to triage thousands of alerts per day—one every 40 seconds on average. Most are false alarms. A few are genuine threats. The real challenge isn’t visibility; it’s focus. How do you know which alerts matter when every tool is screaming for your attention?
That’s where AI comes in. And not just any AI—the kind that thinks and acts like a teammate. As we discussed, agentic AI represents a shift from passive pattern recognition to autonomous decision support. Instead of merely identifying potential threats, agentic systems can prioritize them, contextualize them, and even recommend (or execute) response actions.
If that sounds like science fiction, it’s not. As Raghu points out, many of the prescriptive tasks assigned to Level 1 SOC analysts—correlating events, escalating cases, and following playbooks—are ideal for automation. An agentic system doesn’t get tired, doesn’t lose focus, and doesn’t fear missing an alert that might end up on the evening news. It simply does the job, at scale, with consistency.
In the episode, we talked about how this approach might reshape the traditional SOC hierarchy. Rather than replacing humans, AI could specialize in specific “personas” that complement human expertise. You might have one agent trained as a first-tier analyst, another tuned to compliance monitoring, and another to executive-level risk analysis. Together, these agents form a collaborative mesh that filters, enriches, and interprets data before it ever hits a human’s desk.
That’s not just a technology upgrade—it’s an operational shift. It redefines how teams think about detection, response, and ultimately resilience. Because resilience isn’t just about blocking attacks or patching vulnerabilities; it’s about ensuring the business continues to function even when something breaks.
What struck me most about our discussion was how seamlessly this connects back to Illumio’s roots in segmentation. For years, the company has helped organizations visualize and contain movement within their environments. Now, by layering intelligent agents into that framework, they’re taking the next logical step: using automation not just to observe risk, but to act on it.
We also talked about how the traditional boundaries between security disciplines—vulnerability management, threat detection, breach simulation—are beginning to blur. In a future shaped by agentic systems, those silos start to dissolve. Tools, agents, and human operators all contribute to a shared understanding of exposure, risk, and response. The result could be a more unified, adaptive form of cybersecurity—one built not on isolated alerts, but on intelligent, contextual awareness.
That’s the promise of agentic AI. It’s not about replacing human judgment; it’s about amplifying it. And as Raghu notes, the sooner organizations embrace that shift, the closer we get to a world where “alert fatigue” is finally a thing of the past.
Ireland