A Glimpse Into a Day Without Automation in the SOC

What would happen if AI-powered tools designed to ease the burden of cybersecurity analysts suddenly stopped working for a day? What would it feel like to return to the so-called 'good old days'—when everything was done manually?

Picture this: a typical Monday morning in a Security Operations Center. Analysts are hunched over their desks, juggling countless browser tabs—each tied to a different client’s security dashboard. Detected IOCs are manually cross-checked on public and private threat intelligence sources like VirusTotal. Incident reports are crafted in Word documents, data copied and pasted from Excel, where analyst teams maintain outdated and error-prone mailing lists.

This is not fiction. This was the daily reality for many Managed Security Services Providers until recently. One company in particular—let’s call it CyberLynx—employed one full-time staff member solely to produce client monthly reports for their 62 clients. Each report required building 30-slide decks, downloading and manipulating data in Excel, updating statistics, generating graphs, and formulating incident commentary. All by hand.

The issue wasn’t merely speed. It was human error. It was burnout. It was the frustration of skilled professionals reduced to performing mechanical tasks for hours each day.

The Breaking Point

In 2023, CyberLynx faced a critical juncture. Detected security alerts had doubled in just twelve months, yet the team size remained unchanged. There was simply no time to manually review them all. Low-severity alerts were routinely discarded; the throughput was too high to sustain without significant headcount expansion. And skilled cybersecurity professionals were becoming increasingly scarce.

The company had invested in a SOAR platform the year before, hoping to alleviate the pressure. But as is often the case, the real challenge wasn’t acquiring the tool—it was finding the time, expertise, and continuity to configure, tune, and maintain it. Automation remained an ambition, not a reality. Without dedicated resources to write and evolve playbooks, the SOAR remained dormant. The orchestration was never completed; the burden stayed firmly on the human analysts.

Mounting pressure led to attrition. One in three analysts left within six months. They weren’t quitting the company—they were quitting the spreadsheets, the copy-pasting, the chaos.

The Turning Point

Everything changed when CyberLynx launched a pilot programme focused on AI-based automation. The average time to resolve an incident was cut in half …. With 40,000 incidents annually, the savings amounted to about 500k€ in resource costs, equivalent to around 2,000 working days.

2 days of one employee each month became sufficient to manage the entire reporting process across all clients. Efficiency skyrocketed. But more importantly, the team could finally shift its focus to higher-value activities: threat hunting, skill development, and strategic planning. And CyberLynx was able to increase its client base without impacting the team's efficiency and mental health.

The Real Value of Automation

The lesson? Automation is not about replacing people. It is about protecting them.

Automation is one of the most impactful organisational innovations in modern cybersecurity when designed to complement rather than substitute human expertise. The nostalgic longing for “how things used to be” vanishes the moment you leave a critical alert unattended for 42 minutes, because no one was free to look at it.

Curious how CyberLynx solved the problem?

They did not simply add another tool—they adopted a solution that worked out of the box, delivering immediate value from day one. No lengthy integration, no custom scripts, no delays.

At RedCarbon, we believe automation should empower your SOC team, not replace it—nor burden it with more complexity. Our AI Agents are designed to integrate seamlessly, scale effortlessly, and start making a difference from the very first alert.

Do you recognise yourself in CyberLynx’s story? Are you still struggling with the same pain points—overwhelmed teams, unused SOAR platforms, or a backlog of alerts you simply cannot manage?

If so, why not take a look at what RedCarbon can offer? No pressure, no commitment—just an opportunity to explore whether our solution might be what your team has been missing.

👉 Book a demo and see for yourself.