AI Is Forcing SecOps to Rethink the Modern SOC

Security teams are drowning in telemetry, and the tools built to make sense of it were designed for a world that no longer exists. On a recent episode of the Security Strategist Podcast, host Richard Stiennon sat down with Cliff Crosland, co-founder and CEO of Scanner, to unpack why traditional SIEM platforms are buckling under modern log volumes. Together they also covered how AI agents are starting to change what's possible in threat detection, response, and hunting.

Crosland’s journey into cybersecurity didn’t follow the usual path. He and his co-founder spent years as backend and distributed-systems engineers at earlier startups, where they ended up running the SIEM alongside everything else. Those experiences exposed a clear gap, which eventually became the foundation for Scanner.

Why Traditional SIEMs Struggle With Modern Log Volumes

Crosland traced the SIEM’s roots back to on-premise platforms such as QRadar, ArcSight and Splunk. They were built for an era when security data was measured in gigabytes per day. Today, cloud infrastructure, sprawling SaaS environments and autonomous agents can generate terabytes or even hundreds of terabytes of data. That architecture mismatch forces security teams into a painful trade-off: either get selective about which logs even make it into the SIEM, or watch performance and cost spiral out of control.

The economics get worse as environments grow. Adding servers to keep an aging cluster alive can become more expensive than the software license itself, and searches that once took seconds can stretch into hours once a SIEM is overwhelmed. The result, Crosland argued, is that most organisations end up retaining far less historical data than they would like, right as AI-driven attacks make that history more valuable, not less.

His prescription is architectural: decouple storage from compute using cloud and object storage, the way modern data infrastructure generally works, rather than forcing everything through a stateful, on-prem-style cluster. That shift, he said, is the only realistic way to make comprehensive log monitoring affordable at scale.

How AI Agents Are Reshaping Threat Detection

The conversation turned to what becomes possible once teams aren't rationing their log history. Crosland described a workflow where agents can pick up fresh threat intelligence - a vendor breach discovered months after the fact - and immediately search years of historical data instead of waiting on a slow, expensive rehydration process. Investigations that once consumed a day or a week can compress into seconds.

That speed feeds what Crosland called a virtuous cycle: threat intelligence drives threat hunts, threat hunts surface gaps, and agents translate those findings into new detection rules, tuned to an organisation's specific environment and back-tested against historical data before a human reviews and ships them. Rather than writing every rule by hand, analysts increasingly guide and validate what agents propose.

Agents also change the calculus around alert volume. Teams have historically suppressed alerts to avoid overwhelming analysts, but with agents handling first-pass triage, Crosland said organisations can afford to monitor a much wider surface area because the initial sorting no longer depends entirely on human bandwidth.

Why Monitoring Everything Matters

Stiennon pointed to another worrying trend: 2026 has already seen a sharp rise in disclosed vulnerabilities. Attackers are increasingly using AI to chain together low-severity flaws that once seemed safe to ignore. Crosland pointed to the widely discussed Hugging Face incident, where AI agents reportedly communicated by encoding data into directory names, as an example of exactly the kind of activity that slips past teams focused only on "obvious" high-severity signals.

The fix, he argued, is to monitor high-volume log sources that teams often cut for cost reasons, including package manager activity, VPC flow logs, and DNS queries. Early signs of a chained exploit can appear as simple anomalies, such as an unexpected spike in log volume. Catching those patterns can mean detecting an incident in minutes rather than months.

Looking ahead, Crosland sees a hybrid model taking shape. A SIEM handles the most critical alerts, while a data lake stores the remaining log sources previously cut for cost reasons. Agents can query both, alongside tools such as CSPM platforms, to build a fuller picture before escalating to a human analyst.

His advice to security leaders is to look for cheaper, more scalable ways to store and search log data before deciding what to cut, and treat AI agents as force multipliers for threat hunting and detection tuning rather than replacements for team judgment. As he put it, the goal is a security program where monitoring "everything" is no longer an aspiration but a baseline expectation.

For more on Scanner’s approach to security data, visit scanner.dev. Or connect with Cliff Crosland on LinkedIn.

Takeaways

• Limitations of traditional SIEM systems in handling large log volumes.
• The role of AI and data lakes in enhancing threat detection and response.
• The importance of monitoring high-volume logs like network traffic and package manager logs.
• Using AI agents for threat hunting and detection engineering.
• The impact of AI on vulnerability discovery and chaining low-level exploits.
• Strategies for security leaders to leverage data lakes and hybrid architectures.