2026 Prediction: AI Will Merge the NOC and SOC

NOC and the SOC teams have long been a little like House Stark and House Lannister: they might be living in the same kingdom, but they have very different ways of ruling their own fiefdoms.

In the not-too-distant future, I see a world where NOC and SOC teams merge into one fusion center thanks in large part to the adoption of AI and a federated approach to data management, which will remove friction around data access, cost, and other barriers to entry. This isn’t just a technical evolution; it’s a fundamental business shift that will redefine operational efficiency and risk management.

NOC and SOC teams often do not always see eye to eye on data value, risk, or where to invest. Each team tends to myopically focus on their own priorities and optimize for its own mission. SecOps zeroes in on security logs to spot threats and vulnerabilities, often blocking threats without full operational context. The NOC is responsible for maintaining overall system health, reliability, and performance. The result is two disciplined teams that still struggle to run deeper, shared investigations to find true root causes, validate external factors, reduce true noise, and add the context that prevents repeat incidents. False positives to a SOC might not be a false positive to a NOC and vice versa.

The differences in their missions, how they value and use data, and budget owners create barriers that prevent a clear pathway to a NOC-SOC convergence — that is, until now.

AI, data federation drive a NOC-SOC merger

When combined as a fusion center, NOC teams gain wider visibility with deeper context   across all assets, while SOCs benefit from a more complete and accurate anomaly detection. This is where AI will help correlate information to spot previously hidden patterns and not be limited on past work experiences. For merged NOC and SOC teams, that means detecting malicious traffic sooner to help identify and prevent network or security outages.

AI will play a transformative role in enabling and enhancing the fusion center that unifies NOC and SOC operations. By leveraging advanced analytics, machine learning, and automation, AI can seamlessly ingest, correlate, and analyze vast volumes of data from both network operations and security sources in real time. This unified visibility allows teams to quickly detect anomalies, identify emerging threats, and pinpoint operational disruptions that span both domains.

For example, AI-powered tools can automatically correlate seemingly unrelated network performance issues with security incidents, revealing multi-faceted attacks or vulnerabilities that might otherwise go undetected in siloed environments. AI-driven behavioral analytics can identify patterns of suspicious activity across users, devices, and network traffic, providing early warning of sophisticated threats such as insider attacks or lateral movement.

Data federation reduces friction by letting each team access and analyze data wherever it already lives, without fighting over ownership, access rights, or forcing everything into a single repository. Both teams, now operating as one, can keep using their preferred domain-specific tools, but work from a shared, singular view of the environment. That means fewer access bottlenecks, less frustration, and faster detection and resolution as network and security data becomes easier to search and correlate.

Paired with AI, federation changes the cost equation. Historically, hunting for a needle in petabytes of data required expensive, large-scale ingestion and storage. With federated search, AI can run targeted queries across smaller datasets in multiple locations, lowering both ingestion overhead and the cost of analysis and making the merging of the NOC and SOC less fantasy and more reality.

A stronger, better NOC and SOC

More than co-location or shared tools, the new joint team within the fusion center will offer stronger, outcome-driven operations. In short, it will be better than the sum of its parts, enabling business resilience, risk-aware availability, and security-informed performance. It will also allow NOC and SOC professionals to conduct signal correlation of network anomalies, security alerts, and application behavior at scale, leading to early detection of attacks masked as outages. The center will also enable automation with context by providing automated containment without breaking services, network changes that account for security risk, and security actions that respect uptime and SLAs.

But more than that, the joint team in the fusion center will dramatically shape the way talent is hired and the face of the overall workforce. Because AI-driven operations will reduce the need for narrowly focused technical experts, NOC and SOC professionals will shift from being technical specialists to adaptive thinkers, and organizations will increasingly prioritize hiring employees who can help bridge the gap by developing a methodical approach between technology and business resilience. This ripple effect means a more engaged workforce, improved employee retention, and the ability to attract the new generation of cross-domain talent.

Merging SOC, NOC, and help-desk tier 1 roles in an enterprise operations center (EOC), allows AI to handle triage and resolution across domains, minimizing redundancies, and allowing broader cross-functional support. This frees resources from tier 2 and tier 3 roles,  upskilling existing staff so they can focus on higher-value problem solving.

For executives, this convergence will let them reprioritize their operations and find ways to be more effective within their organization.

Integrating the NOC and SOC is a win-win

When NOC and SOC teams join forces with their skills, resources, and data, everyone wins if done correctly. NOC-SOC convergence into a fusion center will mean fewer false positives due to better root cause analysis and a clearer more holistic view of network health and security. Previously, both security and network teams might close out an issue as a false positive because they determine it was respectively not a security issue or network issue (while in actuality it might be the other). For this unified team, better root cause analysis will result in fewer closed “unknowns.” Broader access to information between teams will give them more insight into problems and the ability to accurately validate an issue, in turn, increasing overall trust in analysts’ decisions and final call.

The combination of a unified NOC and SOC, coupled with an AI implementation, will also give both teams a better ability to weed through the noise to locate signals. This gives the SOC, in particular, a means of being more predictive and proactive when detecting threats, enabling them to find bad actors quickly before they cause harm.

But the fusion center won't just positively impact internal teams. Fewer false positives, increased accuracy, and greater insight into the environment will also extend to customers, who will likely see significant improvements to service quality, fewer disruptions, and faster responses to help desk issues.

NOC-SOC integration begins with a strong data strategy

It's clear that an integrated fusion center is well underway for the new year, and is likely to yield copious benefits. But it won’t happen overnight. While technology like AI and federated search has made integration a viable and affordable reality, humans still need to lay the groundwork for convergence with a comprehensive data management strategy to ensure that data flows efficiently, complete and is actionable for both teams. A solid data management strategy will be imperative to unify data, define compliance standards, enable orchestration and automation, and create mechanisms for collection, storage, and metric visualizations.

Explore more from Splunk’s 2026 Predictions series, where we look ahead at what’s next for security, observability, and AI. In this series, we also cover generative UI interfaces, why smart risk-taking can strengthen your security posture, and how unified observability will drive better business results.  To learn more, subscribe to the Perspectives by Splunk monthly newsletter.