Build to Learn, Buy to Scale: When to Build Your Own AI SOC (and When to Stop)
Sysdig, Thursday, June 25th, 2026
Sysdig weighs building versus buying an AI SOC, recommending custom builds for learning but vendors for scale.
This post explores the tradeoff between building and buying an AI-powered Security Operations Center. Building in-house offers valuable learning about visibility and data pipelines, but long-term costs from maintenance, staffing, and model drift become prohibitive at scale.
The author recommends treating custom builds as educational exercises and shifting to vendor solutions once response times cannot consistently meet the Sysdig 555 Benchmark, which calls for detecting threats in 5 seconds, investigating in 5 minutes, and responding in 5 minutes.