In the rapid race to become digital-first, many organizations are discovering a painful truth: security was often an afterthought. Today, security operations centers (SOCs) are facing a "perfect storm" of AI-accelerated attacks, overwhelming cloud telemetry, and tightening budgets.
Sumo Logic's 2025 Security Operations Insights report highlights a massive shift in the industry: 73% of security leaders are currently considering alternative SIEM solutions. Even among those who feel confident in their current tools, 75% are still evaluating alternatives, proving that "good enough" is no longer a guarantee of loyalty.
The study surveyed more than 500 IT and security leaders from enterprise organizations.
Defining the core: SIEM and SOAR
To understand why the industry is at this crossroads, we must define the two pillars of modern security operations.
SIEM (Security Information and Event Management)
A SIEM acts as the central brain of security operations. It blends rich data collection from across the enterprise with embedded, adaptive analytics to spot trouble. Modern SIEMs effectively double as a security data lake, layering advanced detection on top of massive volumes of telemetry.
From the report regarding SIEM:
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"SIEM solutions that excel in data parsing, normalization, and mapping to a common schema or data model support enterprise needs for telemetry from diverse sources. Writing detections directly against raw logs as they are ingested from different security tools is brittle and labor-intensive to maintain. Replacing one security solution with another requires rewriting rules in the new vendor’s log format, leading to operational bottlenecks, and nuanced vendor log formats make correlation complex."
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"When organizations normalize data into a consistent schema, they can maintain and enhance detections regardless of changes in the underlying security tools or cloud providers. This approach also upholds robust correlation across disparate data sources because the SIEM can process normalized data consistently, regardless of the vendor’s log format."
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"Organizations should select SaaS-based SIEM platforms that offer built-in support for these tasks to alleviate the burden on in-house security teams and stay up to date with evolving data formats and security challenges."
SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response)
If the SIEM is the brain, SOAR is the nervous system. It provides an embedded automation service that drives "playbooks"—pre-defined workflows that turn security insights into consistent, rapid, and automated actions.
From the report regarding SOAR:
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"Enterprises that are actively searching for their next SIEM are likely to be on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence in security."
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"Alert fatigue is pushing buyers toward platforms that behave like AI co-analysts, not mere log collectors. The strongest signal from the survey is clear: respondents say an integrated automation layer (SOAR) inside the SIEM is essential for handling future, more complex threats. In their own words, they want a system that correlates events in real time, explains why they matter, and launches first-step remediation automatically—so human analysts begin every investigation several moves ahead."
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"Emerging technologies—especially LLMs and AI—play a complementary role in next-generation SIEMs, rather than acting as a complete replacement. LLMs can analyze textual data at an unprecedented scale, so AI-powered SIEMs can efficiently process vast amounts of security data and detect threats with greater accuracy."
The report identifies a widening gap between what defenders need to see and what traditional SIEMs can actually surface. This gap is fueling several critical challenges for CISOs and their teams.
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The alert fatigue crisis: More than 70% of security professionals struggle with alert fatigue. Teams are frequently overwhelmed by more than 10,000 alerts per day, making noise reduction a top priority.
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The demand for AI-native defense: 90% of respondents state that Artificial Intelligence is a critical factor in their decision to purchase new security solutions. Leaders are looking for tools that behave like "AI co-analysts" rather than simple log collectors.
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Vendor lock-in fears: A staggering 95% of organizations cite vendor lock-in as a primary concern. Leaders are increasingly favoring "best-of-breed" investments that support open standards like OpenTelemetry (OTel), allowing them to pivot as threats and budgets change.
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Integrated automation: Detection alone isn't enough; 84% of leaders now consider integrated SOAR within their SIEM as essential for handling future, complex threats.
Implications for 2026 and the future
Looking toward 2026, the data points to a three-stage evolution for the SOC.
Stage 1 - Operational automation (today’s baseline): Teams are already automating the "toil"—normalization, correlation, and basic containment.
Stage 2 - Analyst-assistive AI (near term): The next leap involves AI that provides a "why this matters" narrative in plain language, effectively elevating Tier-1 analysts to handle senior-level cases. Early data shows that AI playbooks can reduce average incident response times by 34%.
Stage 3 - Organization-tuned intelligence (the strategic differentiator): In the future, mature teams will train AI models on their own specific business logic and historical incident data. This allows the system to forecast likely intrusion paths unique to that organization’s attack surface.
For CISOs, the message is clear: the era of the "passive" SIEM is over. To move the ROI of security from "status quo" to "excellent," organizations must prioritize cloud-native scalability, open data standards, and AI-driven automation.
In 2026, the most resilient organizations will be those that stop treating security as a siloed afterthought and instead adopt Intelligent SecOps—a proactive, automated approach that protects innovation as fast as it is built.
