The modern security operations center (SOC) in 2025 is a far cry from the siloed, reactive setups of the past. Twenty years ago, SOCs concentrated on perimeter defense, firewalls, antivirus, and basic IDS. Security analysts manually sifted through logs and alerts, often overwhelmed by false positives. Monitoring of threats was largely confined to on-premises, internal infrastructure. Cloud, mobile, and IoT weren’t yet major concerns. Security Information and Event Management(SIEM) tools were just starting to gain traction, offering basic log aggregation and correlation. SOCs were small, in-house, isolated teams with limited automation and little integration across other departments.