This deep dive expands on the Loop Asia conversation with Buu Lam, Community Evangelist at F5.

At Govware, Buu Lam put it bluntly: "There's no dollar amount that's gonna tell somebody that it's okay to buy this product and forfeit your ability to mitigate a solution within 30 minutes. That has implications that are well beyond the tier of the SOC at that point. That's a C level problem that you've just created."

For a COO or Head of Professional Services, that reframes the buying decision. The license fee is visible; the integration cost is too, if scoped. The gap between what a tool can theoretically do and what your team can do under pressure rarely shows up on a spreadsheet — and it's usually the largest number in the room.

Two costs, not one

Buu splits the cost into layers vendors would rather you not separate: the hard cost — license, implementation; the soft cost — time spent context-switching between yet another dashboard and the ones your team trusts; and the downstream cost — what happens when time-to-mitigation slips from 30 minutes to something worse. That third layer is the one worth a board's attention: a tool can pass every proof-of-concept and still fail here, because a POC is run by people who already understand it, not the tier-1 analyst facing it mid-incident eight months later.

The capability gap hiding inside the tool gap

A second thread, easy to miss: the difference between a seasoned SOC analyst and a level-one analyst isn't just tooling — it's pattern recognition built over years. "A really well-seasoned operator does know that that one signal actually has a few different elements to it, but a very new operator... might not have that experience." Tier-3 specialists could close that gap, but they're scarce and permanently occupied, so mentoring often doesn't happen.

Put the two threads together: a tool that doesn't integrate widens the experience gap your organisation is trying to close. Your most experienced people can route around a fragmented toolset because they know what they're looking for. Your newest people can't — and they're on the floor most often.

The corrective: cost a new tool against how much faster it makes your least experienced person, not your most experienced one. Treat a tool needing a separate dashboard as a capability-building cost — your tier-1 team pays it every time a real incident hits, long after whoever approved the purchase moved on.