RANT Edinburgh Roundtable in partnership with Check Point

One of the longest-lived tropes of cybersecurity lore is the idea that the major weakness is the user. It’s by no means a controversy-free assertion, and most cybersecurity professionals would agree that businesses would be better off designing security solutions that helped users and made them part of the solution, rather than berating them for being causes of the problem. Yet the routes adversaries try to go down as they seek to gain access to the business all go through different people, so human beings need to be at the heart of every aspect of a security strategy.

Certainly, this is true of the security apparatus deployed across the enterprise. Operations centres and incident-response teams may depend on sophisticated defensive tools, but these tools are all operated by diligent, well-trained and highly experienced staff. Still, though, the attacks succeed – and with the pace and scale of adversary operations amped up by the advent of generative AI systems, your organisation’s SOCs, NOCs and IRTs are always playing catch-up.

Perhaps, our friends at cyber solutions provider Check Point wonder, we are approaching the point where the humans in the security loop might be holding defensive capabilities back. There is no longer time for an analyst to interrogate the logs and take a decision; AI agents built into many security tools can respond far more quickly, and automated Data Loss Prevention processes are already helping ensure that well-intentioned users don’t leak sensitive data by accident. Some difficult questions about oversight and control are already being raised, but there’s a bigger challenge looming: has the human in your security loop become your weakest link?

Join a select group of your senior cybersecurity leadership peers, and staff from Check Point, to discuss whether the SOC has become redundant, and how organisations can best balance pace of action with human authority and responsibility.