Topic starter
08/07/2026 6:59 pm
TL;DR: Rising alert volumes, critical visibility gaps, and dissatisfaction with current SIEM deployments are exposing structural limits in fragmented detection operations, according to Gurucul’s 2025 Pulse of the AI SOC. The core issue is not just more noise, but a security model that cannot reliably see identity and cloud behaviour fast enough to act.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Gurucul: “2025 Pulse of the AI SOC: Why SOC is Breaking”.
By the numbers:
- 96% of respondents report critical blind spots, most commonly in cloud infrastructure and identity and access behavior.
- Only 4% of respondents can fully onboard a new feed in under a day.
- 78% of organizations are either dissatisfied, stuck with limitations, or forced to augment their current SIEM solutions.
Key questions
Q: Why do SOCs miss identity-driven attacks even when alert volumes are high?
A: Because high alert volume does not guarantee correlated evidence.
Q: What happens when cloud and identity telemetry are not onboarded quickly enough?
A: The SOC operates with blind periods in exactly the areas attackers use most.
Q: What do security teams get wrong about EDR alert fatigue?
A: They often treat alert fatigue as a tuning problem when it is also a workflow problem.
Practitioner guidance
- Prioritise identity telemetry for correlation Identify the identity and access sources that most improve cross-tool correlation, then make them first-class inputs to detection engineering, not optional enrichers.
- Measure onboarding time as a control metric Track how long it takes to turn a new cloud, SaaS or identity feed into an actionable detection source, and escalate delays that leave the SOC blind.
- Reduce tool overlap in the detection stack Review where multiple platforms are collecting the same signals without a shared investigation model, and remove redundant paths that add noise rather than context.
Bottom line: Identity and cloud blind spots are undermining modern SOC performance more than raw alert volume alone.
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08/07/2026 7:21 pm
Identity visibility is now a detection prerequisite, not a luxury signal. The article shows that SOCs cannot reliably detect modern attacks when identity and cloud behaviour are under-instrumented. That is especially true where account takeover, privilege abuse and SaaS misuse unfold across multiple systems before any single alert looks severe. The practitioner conclusion is straightforward: if identity is missing from the correlation layer, the detection programme is structurally incomplete.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How do security teams reduce identity blind spots across code and cloud?
A: They reduce blind spots by correlating GitHub activity with cloud identity signals, enforcing least privilege on repository and workflow permissions, and treating exposed secrets as lifecycle events. That approach helps teams detect drift earlier and cut the time between exposure, investigation, and revocation.
👉 Read our full editorial: SOC identity visibility gaps are breaking modern detection programs