More often, they happen when your teams are offline: when your SOC is running on minimal staffing, when an alert gets buried under hundreds of others. It’s intentional, of course. Attackers deliberately operate during evenings and weekends precisely because they know the human-led response slows down after hours.
But AI doesn’t sleep. And that’s where the modern Security Operations Centre gains its edge.
Let’s say a threat actor compromises an employee’s credentials through a targeted phishing campaign. They wait until a Sunday evening to test access, logging in from a foreign IP, moving laterally across shared systems until they hit the jackpot – your critical data. Then, they slowly start exfiltrating data in small increments to avoid detection.
In a traditional SOC, this may trigger an alert – but with no one watching closely and no immediate triage, it slips through.
In an AI-enabled SOC, that same activity looks very different.
Within seconds, AI correlates these signals, scores the risk, and notifies analysts not just with an alert, but with an incident story.
This isn’t just faster detection, it’s smarter prevention and the key difference is context.
Traditional security systems rely on static rules: block this IP, flag that file. But attackers know how to work around rules. AI looks at behaviour, not just signatures.
It understands that a finance contractor doesn’t normally log in on a Sunday night from Romania. Or download 1.2GB of encrypted ZIP files. It picks up on low-and-slow indicators of compromise and pieces them together. As I said: Context.
After-hours coverage has always been a challenge. Hiring overnight SOC analysts is expensive and hard to scale. An AI-powered SOC closes that gap, not by replacing humans, but by amplifying what your team can do, when they can’t be there in person.
It reduces noise, spots the meaningful signals, and takes intelligent first-response actions so your team can take over from a position of control.
In short, AI gives you visibility when attackers hope you’re blind. It means your defences don’t clock off at 5.30pm – and your response time doesn’t depend on who’s on call.
Head of Security Services
Every 5th November, Britain remembers Guy Fawkes – the man caught red-handed beneath Parliament with 36 barrels of gunpowder. Now, Guy Fawkes wasn’t a ‘modern-day’ hacker, but, if you squint, the Gunpowder Plot is a story about infiltration, hidden threats, and the thin line between luck and disaster – some may argue not too dissimilar to the playbook of today’s cyber adversaries.
Not all change is progress.
Over the past 18 months, parts of the IT industry have been quietly rewriting the commercial rulebook. Several major vendors have shifted from perpetual licences to multi-year subscriptions, often accompanied by steep price rises and rigid terms.
The Procurement Act 2023 marks a fundamental shift in UK public procurement, replacing broad principles with a new regime of prescriptive transparency. For contracting authorities managing parts of the UK’s £385 billion annual public spend, this legislation introduces a series of legally mandated, data-intensive reporting obligations.
From NHS ransomware attacks to the Royal Mail being frozen out of global operations, cyber threats are no longer theoretical – they’re national disruptions. As attacks grow more targeted, stealthy, and sophisticated, the UK Government is taking a bold step to plug the legislative gaps and put resilience on the boardroom agenda.
AI adoption in IT is not uniform. The most advanced tools often require significant investment in licensing, infrastructure and integration. As a result, access to AI capabilities is often dictated by budget, not just technical readiness and expertise.
If your data is exposed on the dark web, but you don’t know about it – can you still be held accountable?
Like many industries and sectors, AI and automation are already changing the structure of IT teams. Routine operational work that used to be handled by junior engineers is increasingly carried out by intelligent systems. That work hasn’t disappeared, it’s just being done without human involvement.
The cyber threat landscape has shifted. Fast.
That means the traditional SOC, reliant on manual triage and static rule sets, is falling behind.
Enter the AI-powered SOC. Not just a nice-to-have, instead a necessary evolution in how we approach cyber defence.
Most organisations expect attacks to come from the outside: a malicious payload, a phishing email, a brute-force attempt at the firewall. But in many cases, the foundations of those attacks were laid weeks or months earlier – quietly, invisibly – through data already circulating on the dark web.