Introduction
Welcome to an inside look at a typical day for a Security Operations Center (SOC) analyst in 2025, offering an updated perspective on the responsibilities that evolve with experience. This account provides an idea of the types of duties you might encounter as you progress in your cybersecurity career, potentially inspiring those looking to enter or advance in the field. While working from home 90% of the time, the responsibilities generally remain consistent whether in the office or remotely. This is a real, uncensored look at the daily grind, far from the idealized “wake up at 6 AM” routines-AI Revolutionizing Cybersecurity Awareness
The Rise of AI-Driven Cybersecurity Awareness in 2025
Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way people named cybersecurity in 2025. SOC teams are using AI-based solutions more and more not just to find and fix problems but also to teach users ahead of time. Adaptive training platforms now leverage AI to send out bespoke awareness modules based on how employees act, new dangers, or phishing tendencies. These algorithms can find patterns in how users interact, guess where they might be weak, and give micro-training in real time. Such an approach dramatically lowers the chance of human mistake, which is still one of the primary reasons for security breaches.
AI-driven threat intelligence is also helping analysts keep ahead of new ways that attackers may get in. Tools that use natural language processing (NLP) to automatically summarize threat data, and AI chatbots that are being used in internal systems to answer employees’ inquiries about security hygiene, policy changes, or incident protocols are two examples of how AI is being used in security. This combined focus on automated detection and informed human intervention is changing what it means to be aware of cybersecurity in business settings.
Morning Routines: Setting the Stage for Security-AI Revolutionizing Cybersecurity Awareness
The day kicks off with crucial preparatory tasks to manage the cybersecurity landscape:
Calendar Check and Meeting Involvement:
The very first step is to check the calendar, which is considered the most important and underrated task, as it sets the expectation for the workday. Fewer meetings often mean more time for deep-focus work. As experience grows, a SOC analyst becomes more involved in higher-level meetings, such as scoping out potential vendor solutions, planning, and one-on-ones with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). Although the meetings can be packed, they are an integral part of the job.
Alert Triage on SOAR Platform:
The next routine involves checking for alerts on modern SOAR platforms, like Splunk SOAR (still widely adopted in 2025). This platform has automated systems to ingest and process reported phishing emails. When analyzing a reported phishing event, the focus is typically on the left panel showing automations that ran and the artifacts panel, where the email is stripped into pieces like URLs or recipients. Key red flags to look for include
- Multiple exclamation marks in the subject line convey a sense of urgency.
- Generic greetings like “good morning,” which often indicate spam.
- When the displayed text and the underlying URL of a hyperlink diverge, it suggests malicious intent.
- To double-check, a URL can be thrown into VirusTotal for a quick scan; more than one hit is usually sufficient to block everything. Actions like blocking the sender and all URLs are executed via prompts generated by automations called playbooks, which are low-code, drag-and-drop solutions connecting APIs. This entire process for clearing out the SOAR backlog typically takes 1 to 2 hours.
Monitoring Other System Alerts via SIEM:AI Revolutionizing Cybersecurity Awareness
After the SOAR platform, attention shifts to other system alerts. Splunk is a well-known SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) tool that security teams use to gather log data from many sources for alerting, monitoring, and threat hunting. They make their own dashboards to keep an eye on different systems for signs of trouble, such as users who have a lot of unsuccessful logins or IP addresses that look suspect. These panels get their strength from Splunk search queries, which extract and filter data to find hazards.
Addressing Help Desk Tickets:
The final morning routine involves checking for tickets on the ITSM (IT Service Management) platform, essentially help desk tickets. Most of these are requests for access to websites or systems. On rarer occasions, users might raise an incident ticket concerning a compromised user or device. The team frequently moves these tickets up for more investigation, which is comparable to incident response and involves looking for Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) in the systems. Examples of IOCs include an increase in network traffic on a laptop (potentially data exfiltration) or activity outside office hours (suggesting account takeover).
These tasks generally fill the morning session, with higher-level thinking and focused work often reserved for the early afternoon, especially after lunch and coffee.
Midday and Strategic Initiatives: Elevating Security Posture-AI Revolutionizing Cybersecurity Awareness
The afternoon often involves more strategic, higher-level work:
ISO 27001 Certification Efforts:
A significant ongoing project involves achieving ISO 27001 certification. This means numerous meetings with vendors to uplift security solutions and meet requirements. ISO 27001 remains a benchmark for information security in 2025, ensuring organizations stay compliant with ever-evolving digital threats. Achieving it signifies full compliance with the latest security framework and guidelines. This compliance makes a company more attractive to potential clients, assuring them their data is safer and more secure. A small part of this certification process involves ensuring all organizational applications undergo a complete security checklist, covering areas like data encryption, backups, and archiving. While seemingly “boring,” this experience is highly valuable for a SOC analyst’s resume.
Vulnerability Remediation with EDR:
Security teams employ powerful EDR technologies like CrowdStrike, which will be the best in 2025, to fix security holes. An obsolete application with a known flaw, like a macro loophole in Microsoft Excel, represents a vulnerability. A CVE number usually indicates these issues. The repair procedure comprises detecting laptops with vulnerable application versions, updating software, and preferably doing live background updates. Postponing system upgrades hinders security; thus, users should update immediately.
Handling EDR Detections:
The analyst shows how to use CrowdStrike to find endpoints. For instance, if a PUP (Potentially Unwanted Program) finds a virus, it shows the file that caused it, like an Autodesk key generator. The system stops certain files on its own because they have malware in them. The EDR gives information such as the trigger hash and the host. The analyst adds the hash to the IOC block list by hand to get rid of the application if the system doesn’t automatically block the threat.
Late Afternoon: Development and Demonstrating Value
The late afternoon typically shifts toward winding down with development work:
Development Work and Dashboard Creation:
Given a software engineer background, half of the analyst’s responsibilities involve development work. This work often entails building dashboards as needed, such as one summarizing the number of suspicious IP scans received and blocked.
Reporting and Proving Security Team Effectiveness:
Dashboards are crucial for creating reports to demonstrate the security team’s effectiveness to higher management. This step is vital because upper management can sometimes view IT, including cybersecurity, as a massive cost center. If attackers don’t often hack, phish, or break into the business, top management could wonder if it’s worth it to spend money on security measures. To show that they are the company’s backbone and keep everything secure and running, security teams must show numbers and reports.
Conclusion
A 2025 SOC analyst’s day includes critical incident response, strategic project engagement, and development. Despite differences in tasks, morning calendar management, alert triage, and ticket resolution are constant. This detailed overview shows the role’s numerous tasks and progression with experience.
SOC analysts are growing more important as they combine automation, real-time threat detection, and proactive risk management in 2025.
