AGCG Genuine Consulting Group Insight — how the SOC Manager role is evolving across operational resilience, cyber leadership and strategic risk steering.
Topic : SecOps, SOC Manager role & security operations governance
Consulting firm : AGCG Genuine Consulting Group
For years, the SOC Manager was perceived as a mostly technical role — focused on alerts, SIEM consoles and analyst coordination. A function often labelled as “operational”, far from decision-making bodies.
That perception is now obsolete. Today, the SOC has become:
As a result, the SOC Manager is no longer a “super analyst”. They are becoming a conductor of digital defence — at the crossroads of governance, operations, cyber strategy and risk management.
For AGCG Genuine Consulting Group, the transformation of this role is one of the most critical challenges for organizations seeking to move from reactive firefighting to structured cyber resilience.
Organizations face an unprecedented combination of factors: rising alert volumes, increasingly sophisticated attacks (fileless, supply chain, living-off-the-land), massive hybridization of infrastructures (Cloud, SaaS, OT, IoT), and reinforced regulatory requirements (DORA, NIS2, sector-specific rules).
In this context, the SOC’s mission is no longer to simply “see” the attack. Its mission is to preserve business continuity despite the attack. The SOC becomes an operational resilience function.
Consequently, the SOC Manager becomes responsible for the organization’s digital operational continuity, in coordination with the CISO, CIO and critical business functions.
The SOC Manager must now orchestrate simultaneously:
The scope is no longer “managing a team of analysts” — it is steering a critical function spanning operational, tactical and strategic dimensions.
Across our engagements, we observe a significant shortage of profiles able to assume this role. Many organizations still confuse “very technical L3 analyst” with “SOC Manager”, even though the skillsets only partially overlap.
This scarcity is all the more critical given that the SOC Manager is becoming one of the pivotal pillars of the entire defence posture. Not structuring this role means accepting a systemic weakness in the cyber defence chain.
Internal SOCs, outsourced SOCs, hybrid SOCs, cloud-native SOCs, managed detection services, XDR-as-a-service… operating models are evolving rapidly. The SOC Manager must be able to steer:
The role increasingly resembles that of an architect and program director: selecting the right model, framing the provider, orchestrating flows, ensuring detection and response quality.
The SOC Manager must inspire, mentor and unite analysts, engineers and cross-functional partners. They create clarity, foster discipline and ensure consistency in day-to-day operations.
They are expected to demonstrate:
The SOC Manager must translate operational insights into governance language:
They become a bridge between the SOC, IT, security governance and business leadership.
While the role is not purely technical, excellence still requires a strong grasp of:
The SOC Manager does not need to be the best engineer — but must deeply understand what “good detection and response” looks like.
“The SOC Manager is becoming one of the most critical — and rare — leadership roles in cybersecurity.”
— AGCG Genuine Consulting Group
Many SOC Manager failures come from ambiguous mandates. AGCG recommends defining a crisp scope covering:
The SOC Manager must operate with:
These rituals provide predictability, alignment and continuous improvement.
Modern SOCs are hybrid. The SOC Manager becomes a conductor of multiple internal and external teams:
AGCG’s experience shows that the SOC Manager’s strength lies in their ability to build trust and alignment across multiple layers of the organization.
The SOC Manager is no longer a niche operational role. It is becoming a leadership position — central to resilience, risk steering and operational credibility.
Organizations that fail to structure this role risk fragmented detection, inconsistent response, unclear accountability and systemic blind spots.
For AGCG, strengthening the SOC Manager role is one of the most decisive levers to transition from reactive cybersecurity to proactive operational resilience.