The constraint is not a failure of strategy. It is structural. And until recently, it was largely unavoidable.
Why the SOC was built this way
Most security operations centers are designed as human-routing systems. Alerts are ingested, triaged, escalated and resolved by analysts at multiple levels. Every meaningful step, including collecting evidence, correlating signals and making decisions, depends on human capacity.
That dependency introduces variability. Two analysts can approach the same alert differently, influenced by experience, fatigue and time pressure. To improve consistency, organizations introduce playbooks and workflows. But those controls often reduce flexibility, especially in complex cases, and fail to provide coverage where decision making relies in part on unstructured context, and where workflows may not be fully deterministic and require real-time reasoning to determine the best course of action.
