The MSSP Hyperautomation Playbook: How HWG Sababa Doubled SOC Output
By Torq
July 31, 2025
4 Minute Read
Contents
Most MSSPs know the drill: more clients, more tools, more alerts — and somehow, fewer people. The traditional playbook of hiring your way out or custom-scripting every integration just doesn’t work anymore. It’s slow and impossible to maintain across dozens of environments.
HWG Sababa — an Italy-based MSSP — realized this early. Rather than patching the same old processes, they tore up the traditional playbook and rebuilt their MSSP SOC with Hyperautomation as the foundation.
The Top 4 MSSP SOCs Challenges
Scaling security without scaling headcount: Manual processes and custom scripting don’t scale. MSSPs need fast, flexible, and repeatable security automation without needing to code every use case from scratch.
Supporting disjointed customer environments: Each customer brings their own security stack. Integrating dozens of SIEMs, EDRs, and threat intel tools quickly (and securely) is critical to onboarding and retention.
Keeping analysts productive and engaged: Burnout is real. If your SOC analysts are stuck in Tier-1 alert queues all day, you’ll lose them fast — and with them, your operational effectiveness.
Delivering and proving ROI: MSSPs must justify their value with quantifiable outcomes. Response speed, automation rates, and time savings matter just as much as detection quality.
Hyperautomation: The Solution to MSSP SOC Challenges
HWG Sababa, a leading Italian MSSP serving customers across Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, found themselves at a crossroads. Their custom-coded automation system had become a bottleneck — too slow and too dependent on developer resources.
To scale their SOC, they needed a new solution that was:
Easy for analysts to use; no specialized coding skills required
Fast to implement and scale across environments
Seamless to integrate with each customer’s existing security stack
Designed to eliminate repetitive manual tasks at every stage
By focusing first on automating the repetitive, manual Tier-1 tasks that consumed analyst time, HWG Sababa rapidly automated over half (55%) of their total monthly alert volume.
Productivity and Operational Capacity Nearly Doubled
Automating the heavy-lift processes immediately boosted MSSP SOC productivity and efficiency, effectively doubling the team’s operational capacity. SOC analysts moved away from repetitive tasks, shifting focus to complex and strategic cybersecurity analysis.
Enhanced Analyst Morale and Retention
Reducing repetitive workload drastically improved analyst engagement. Automating tasks with Torq freed their SOC analysts to focus on deeper, more strategic cybersecurity work, improving job satisfaction significantly.
Reduced Customer-Side Effort
HWG Sababa also used Torq to automate customer-side actions that previously required manual effort, dramatically reducing their clients’ workloads.
Marco Fattorelli, Head of Innovation, highlighted that Torq allowed HWG Sababa to deliver automated threat detection, containment, and remediation directly within their customers’ environments. This capability eliminated hours of manual effort for clients and significantly improved overall customer satisfaction.
Strategic Adoption Across the Organization
Torq quickly became a critical strategic tool for MSSP SOC operations and other departments. Teams across the organization began adopting Hyperautomation for their own workflows, leading to widespread efficiency gains. This cross-functional adoption underscores Torq’s usability and immediate, tangible benefits.
Hyperautomation: A Clear MSSP SOC Differentiator
Torq Hyperautomation has become a competitive differentiator for MSSPs across the world. Prospective customers immediately recognize the value of significantly reduced response times, precise alert handling, and quantifiable operational efficiency.
No-code/low-code workflows: Analysts — not just engineers — can own and evolve automations.
Vendor-agnostic integrations: Connect instantly with customer tech stacks, avoiding lock-in and delays.
Quantifiable ROI: Track every automated action and turn it into clear business value, both for your SOC and your customers.
Looking Forward: A Hyperautomation-First Mindset
With Torq fully embedded into their operational DNA, MSSPs like HWG Sababa are able to evaluate every new tool, technology, or process first through the lens of automation. Hyperautomation isn’t just a technology choice — it’s central to a long-term operational strategy.
By moving away from manual scripting and legacy automation, MSSPs can dramatically increase their operational scale and responsiveness. Torq Hyperautomation transforms managed SOCs, doubles productivity, cuts response times to mere minutes, and delivers measurable value to MSSP customers.
The results for HWG Sababa speak for themselves: a stronger security posture, empowered analysts, happier customers, and a decisive competitive edge.
Ready to Scale Your MSSP SOC?
Torq helps MSSPs differentiate, accelerate, and deliver with unmatched speed and efficiency.
Want to see exactly how HWG Sababa scaled their MSSP SOC, doubled analyst productivity, and delivered measurable ROI with Torq?
Get AMP’d: Introducing the Torq Alliance & Momentum Partner Program
By Chris Coburn
July 29, 2025
4 Minute Read
Contents
Chris Coburn is the Senior Director of Technology Alliances at Torq, where he leads strategic partnerships that fuel innovation and growth. With experience scaling alliance programs at cybersecurity leaders like Recorded Future, he brings an execution-first mindset to ecosystem development. He’s the architect of Torq’s AMP program, redefining how partners integrate, collaborate, and win together.
At Torq, we don’t believe in playing by the old rules. That’s why we’ve launched the Torq Alliance and Momentum Partners (AMP) program. It’s a bold new take on what a cybersecurity partnership can and should be. AMP is designed to accelerate SecOps innovation, eliminate red tape, and empower partners of all sizes to build, integrate, and grow.
Let’s be honest: most partner programs feel like gated clubs. Rigid tiers, “pay-to-play” models, and success metrics built for giants, not innovators.
With Torq AMP, there’s no tiering. No mandatory customer thresholds. No barriers to entry. What you build and how much effort you put into it matters. Whether you’re a two-person startup with a cool idea or an established leader reshaping a category, AMP gives you the tools and exposure to make it matter.
We’re looking for partners building the coolest, most impactful solutions and putting in the work to bring them to life.
Why Join AMP?
AMP is an ecosystem where innovation meets action. We’ve created a program that aligns technical creativity with meaningful business momentum, including:
Fast-track integration: You get your own Torq instance, hands-on support, and a clear path to go from concept to integration without unnecessary overhead.
Go-to-market that actually goes somewhere: From joint demos and field events to aligned sales plays and enablement, we work side-by-side to drive real pipeline.
Marketing with muscle: AMP partners tap into the full reach of the Torq brand, from strategic social promotion to presence in campaigns, solution briefs, the Torq platform, and yes, even custom swag.
And the best part? AMP is a living program. We don’t stop at launch. We keep building together — more use cases, content, and mutual value. The more you invest, the more you get back.
AMP in Action
Google Cloud + Torq: Powering Cloud-Scale Hyperautomation
Torq’s integration with AMP Partner Google Cloud Platform (GCP) empowers customers to build workflows across Gmail, Drive, Workspace, and more. Google Cloud and Torq accelerate processes with seamless orchestration, rapid threat detection, and automated remediation at scale, making it easier than ever for SecOps teams to protect their cloud environments.
Wiz + Torq: Accelerating Cloud Risk Response
Torq’s integration with Wiz enables cloud-native security teams to automate proactive risk management with ease. Through Torq AMP, joint customers can trigger workflows directly from Wiz alerts and use no-code automation to remediate vulnerabilities, update issue statuses, and correlate cloud risk data with broader security operations. Together, Torq and Wiz accelerate threat detection and response across complex multi-cloud environments.
Get AMP’d
Cybersecurity innovation doesn’t need more red tape; it needs more momentum. That’s exactly what Torq AMP delivers.
If you’re building technology that could transform how SOC teams work, we want to hear from you. Let’s build it, ship it, and wow our mutual customers — together.
Explore the Torq AMP program and get ready to integrate with the most-talked-about company in cybersecurity.
Legacy SOAR solutions emerged in an era of traditional, static on-premises networks with fewer sophisticated threats. But today’s cybersecurity landscape is dramatically different — attack surfaces rapidly evolve, threats are multifaceted, and cybersecurity talent is increasingly scarce.
As organizations struggle with sprawling security stacks and burned-out SOC teams, legacy SOAR solutions reveal their significant limitations. One of the most critical weaknesses is their lack of support for the Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDLC).
The Evolution from SDLC to SSDLC
Every software application, from mobile apps to intricate enterprise solutions, follows a structured development process called the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). SDLC provides a systematic approach, covering requirement analysis, design, coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance. While it allows for systematic steps to ensure software quality and reliability, traditional SDLC often sidelines security until late stages in the software development process.
The growth of sophisticated cyber threats underscores the limitations of traditional SDLC. To address these gaps, the Secure Software Development Lifecycle emerged, embedding security practices at every stage of the development lifecycle. Unlike traditional SDLC, which prioritizes functionality and performance, SSDLC proactively addresses vulnerabilities and significantly reduces risk.
The Importance of Integrating SSDLC into Modern Development
Integrating SSDLC is essential for any organization serious about maintaining digital trust. Cyber threats continue to rise in complexity and frequency, making a security-first approach non-negotiable. The proactive, integrated model of SSDLC dramatically reduces vulnerability risks compared to traditional SDLC methods, which often rely on reactive, late-stage patching and inefficient security tests.
Transitioning to SSDLC signifies more than just a technical shift; it represents an organizational commitment to embedding security deeply into the culture and software development lifecycle, driving resilience, compliance, and long-term trust.
Where Legacy SOAR Fails: Lack of SSDLC Integration
SSDLC ensures that security considerations are seamlessly integrated throughout the entire software development lifecycle and automation workflows, reducing vulnerabilities before they become expensive, high-risk issues in production. However, legacy SOAR solutions typically:
Lack integrated tools and features specifically designed for SSDLC
Require substantial manual effort to verify that workflows meet security and compliance standards
Leave workflows vulnerable to potential security threats due to inadequate built-in security testing and checks
These gaps force organizations to invest considerable resources — both human and financial — to ensure automation workflows remain secure and compliant, resulting in higher operational costs and increased exposure to data breaches.
How Torq Hyperautomation Integrates SSDLC by Design
Unlike traditional SOAR solutions, Torq Hyperautomation™ inherently integrates SSDLC principles throughout its platform, ensuring security is embedded into every aspect of workflow development.
Built-in SSDLC Framework
Torq’s Hyperautomation platform offers a comprehensive framework that covers planning, software development, testing, deployment, and maintenance phases. Embedding secure software development into every step of automation ensures robust, compliant workflows.
Automated Testing and Continuous Validation
With Torq, rigorous automated testing is built into the workflow development process. These comprehensive tests check for:
Vulnerabilities: Continuous scanning and mitigation of security flaws.
Compliance adherence: Automatic checks aligned with industry standards and regulations.
Unlike legacy solutions, Torq’s automated tests are ongoing, not isolated to specific phases. This continuous validation ensures all workflow changes and updates remain secure and adhere strictly to best practices. Torq also integrates seamlessly with existing development tools, creating a unified and efficient workflow environment.
Environment Segmentation: Development, Staging, and Production
Torq allows security teams to separate workflow development into clearly defined staging and production environments. This enables controlled testing and refinement before workflows ever touch a live environment. By isolating workflows this way, Torq dramatically reduces the risk of security incidents and ensures smooth deployments.
Torq Hyperautomation also implements robust role-based access control (RBAC) by default. These stringent access controls ensure only authorized personnel can interact with specific functions, preserving workflow integrity and security.
Agile Workflow Development with Enhanced Security
Torq doesn’t just secure your automation workflows — it accelerates their development. Its intuitive, user-friendly interface empowers users of all technical skill levels to prototype, test, and refine workflows rapidly.
Torq’s iterative, agile-driven development process incorporates continuous feedback, ensuring automations remain effective and adaptive to evolving security requirements. This agile process far surpasses the capabilities of legacy SOAR platforms, enabling your organization to respond swiftly and confidently to new threats.
Hyperautomation is Essential for SSDLC
The future of software security demands an integrated, continuous SSDLC approach that seamlessly fits into an organization’s overall development strategy. Traditional SDLC approaches that defer security considerations are no longer viable in today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape.
Organizations adopting Torq’s Hyperautomation platform can confidently build security into the core of their development processes, ensuring their automation workflows remain robust and resilient against evolving threats. This continuous, integrated security approach positions organizations to maintain compliance, build digital trust, and sustainably mitigate risks.
Legacy SOAR solutions simply can’t keep up with modern cybersecurity demands. Their lack of built-in SSDLC support leaves critical gaps, resulting in higher costs, increased risks, and significant manual overhead. In contrast, Torq’s Hyperautomation platform is built from the ground up with security-first principles.
With automated SSDLC support, rigorous security checks, robust environment segmentation, and agile workflow development, Torq ensures automations are secure, compliant, and ready to handle today’s dynamic threat landscape.
Secure your organization’s future with Torq’s integrated SSDLC and Hyperautomation capabilities.
How Valvoline Hyperautomated Their SOC in Just One Week
By Brittney Wittfeldt
July 17, 2025
4 Minute Read
Contents
Retail cybersecurity teams face a perfect storm: high-volume, low-signal alerts, a massive surface area across stores, POS systems, cloud apps, and third-party vendors, and an environment where any delay in response can lead to reputational and revenue damage.
Yet most retail SOCs are held back by aging infrastructure and brittle tools. Alert fatigue, false positives, and manual workflows turn shifts into chaos. Legacy SOARs aren’t helping; they’re often the problem.
To survive and scale, retail SOCs need automation that’s fast to deploy, easy to use, and flexible enough to handle diverse systems and real-world incident volume. That’s Torq Hyperautomation™. Valvoline faced these exact challenges — and overcame them — by replacing their brittle legacy SOAR with Torq, transforming their SOC in just one week.
Retail SOC Cybersecurity Challenges
Retailers handle massive volumes of customer data, making them prime targets for cybercriminals. At the same time, they face growing IT complexity across stores, e-commerce platforms, and third-party vendors. Legacy systems, minimal in-house resources, and constant alert fatigue make defending against modern threats increasingly difficult.
Top retail threats include:
Phishing and social engineering: Used to steal customer credentials or launch broader attacks.
Ransomware: Often triggered by phishing, disrupting business operations and demanding costly ransoms.
Third-party & IoT risks: Unsecured vendors and smart devices expand the attack surface dramatically.
Credential attacks: From fake accounts to credential stuffing, bots wreak havoc on authentication systems.
DDoS and web exploits: Automated attacks can bring down retail systems and erode customer trust.
To stay resilient, modern retail SOCs need security automation that neutralizes threats faster than attackers can exploit them, without increasing analyst burden.
Hyperautomation: A Better Way to Automate the Retail Industry
When Corey Kenning became Senior Director of InfoSec at Valvoline, he inherited a challenge familiar to many security leaders: Legacy SOAR that broke more than it built. His SOC had been cut in half during a major divestiture, and their deeply customized, brittle SOAR couldn’t keep up. Only a few SMEs could operate it, and everyone else was blocked.
“We needed a platform that didn’t require hard-to-find coding skills. Our SOAR was slowing us down, not scaling us up,” Corey shared. What followed was a full transformation of Valvoline’s security operations — one powered by Torq Hyperautomation™ for automation in retail.
How Valvoline Hyperautomated Their SOC
Valvoline put Torq to the test in a head-to-head proof of value. Within 48 hours, they were live. Within a week, they were running real automation in production.
Their Rapid7 integration, which had stalled for hundreds of hours in their SOAR, was live in less than a week in Torq.
Phishing triage, once eating up to 12 hours per day, became a fully automated workflow, slashing workload by 6–7 analyst hours daily.
Containment actions — password resets, session terminations, and more — became automatic, logged, and auditable via Torq’s built-in case management.
Non-developers could use no-code/low-code drag-and-drop workflows, which made it easy for anyone on the team to contribute.
“Torq takes the vision that’s in your head and actually puts it on paper and into practice.”
Corey Kenning, Senior Director of InfoSec at Valvoline
From Reactive to Proactive: The SOC of the Future
With Torq, retail companies like Valvoline can move from reactive response to a strategic focus.
Anyone can build: Drag-and-drop workflows let even non-developers create automation.
Analysts reclaim their time: Repetitive Tier-1 tasks became automated, eliminating alert fatigue.
Response becomes instant: Clicking a malicious link now triggers a fully automated incident response workflow — no manual intervention required.
Case management got smarter: Built-in automation tracks every action and provides rich incident metrics.
Why Retail SOCs Are Turning to Hyperautomation
Torq isn’t just a better product — it’s a better partner.
From onboarding to enablement, SOC teams are supported by a dedicated Customer Success Manager, Solutions Architect, and content resources at every step. And because Torq is built for scale, Valvoline is now expanding automation to adjacent teams like identity and fraud.
What once took weeks or months now takes days. The Valvoline team is delivering more value with fewer resources — and doing it without waiting on developers or vendors.
Torq Hyperautomation gave Valvoline the speed, flexibility, and confidence they needed to scale security without scaling burnout. Within 48 hours, they were live. Within a week, they were automated. And, they’re just getting started with all that they can do with Torq.
See how Valvoline replaced legacy SOAR, automated phishing triage, and transformed their retail SOC in just one week with Torq Hyperautomation.
Security Operations Center Best Practices to Boost Security & Automate Smarter
By Patrick “PO” Orzechowski
July 16, 2025
10 Minute Read
Contents
Patrick Orzechowski (also known as “PO”) is Torq’s Field CISO, bringing his years of experience and expertise as a SOC leader to our customers. PO is a seasoned security veteran with a deep understanding of the modern security landscape. You can find him talking to SOC leaders and CISOs from major brands at cybersecurity events around the world.
Running a SOC isn’t for the faint of heart. I should know. Late nights, understaffed teams, endless alerts, and jumping from tool to tool — all fueled by a probably unhealthy amount of energy drinks? Yeah, I’ve been right there in the trenches. And let’s face it: the old SecOps playbooks can’t scale in the face of modern SOC challenges.
The SOC best practices below are the hard-won lessons that separate the security operations centers that struggle to keep up from the ones that position themselves as strategic value centers.
Level Up Your SOC: Best Practices to Stay Sharp and Secure
A Security Operations Center (SOC) brings together people, processes, and technology to manage and improve an organization’s security posture. Put simply, it’s the command center for protecting a business from cyber risk and threats.
In a world where a single data breach can cost millions, an efficient SOC isn’t a luxury — it’s a core business function. An effective security operations center can significantly reduce an organization’s risk by identifying, analyzing, and responding to cybersecurity incidents in near real-time, or better yet, finding and mitigating vulnerabilities before they ever become an incident.
When I ask security operations center leaders the “why” behind the way they built their SOC, most mention that it’s to:
Proactively prevent cybersecurity incidents by detecting and fixing vulnerabilities, security monitoring, and gathering threat intelligence on known threats.
Minimize the impact of data breaches by rapidly containing incidents and minimizing their impact on the organization.
Ensure business continuity by protecting critical assets and data so business operations can continue without interruption.
At the end of the day, all of these drive up to the ultimate goal of a SOC: reducing risk to the business.
5 Most Common SOC Challenges
If you run an SOC, these challenges probably keep you up at night. They’re not just headaches — they’re fundamental risks to your security posture.
1. Alert Fatigue
Alert fatigue is more than just “too many alerts” — it’s a soul-crushing onslaught of low-fidelity noise and false positives that buries the critical alerts that matter. While the cybersecurity industry is a bit of a broken record around alert fatigue, it doesn’t change the fact that most teams are still struggling with it — more than half of security teams say false positives are a huge problem, and nearly two-thirds are overwhelmed by sheer data volume. Alert fatigue burns out already stretched-thin SOC teams, delays threat detection and incident response, and increases the risk of missed threats.
2. Tool Overload
Too many security operation centers I see have sprawling security stacks of disconnected tools that don’t play nice. Security analysts waste precious time swiveling between different UIs and even writing clunky PowerShell or Python scripts to gather information, trying to solve a puzzle with pieces from different boxes.
3. Manual Processes
In 2025, there’s simply no need for human SOC analysts to be manually copy-pasting information from one tool to another to build a case. These repetitive, mind-numbing tasks are slow, prone to human error, and a complete waste of your team’s valuable expertise.
4. Talent Shortage
Finding and retaining top-tier security talent is brutally competitive. The shortage is real, and it means you can’t just throw more people at the problem (especially when budgets are lean). You have to make the team you have exponentially more effective. A crucial part of that is keeping your SOC analysts engaged — automating mundane tasks takes tedious work off their plates, which directly increases morale, boosts productivity, and gives your best talent a reason to stay.
5. Scalability Issues
The volume of data from cloud environments, SaaS applications, and distributed endpoints is exploding, and the security perimeter is larger than ever. A SOC built on manual processes and disjointed tools simply cannot scale to meet this demand. As your business operations — and your attack surface — grows, your security coverage will fall further and further behind unless you start automating.
6. The Ransomware Time-Bomb
Today, every organization of any size is a target for ransomware, and ransomware operators are moving at unprecedented speed, with a median time from initial breach to business-ending payload of less than 24 hours. This breakneck pace demands an immediate and flawless response that is nearly impossible to deliver with manual processes.
7 Security Operation Center Best Practices
Since I started at Torq, I’ve heard the same story from CISOs over and over — they’ve finally reached a tipping point with tech sprawl. They’re looking at unwieldy, expensive security stacks and asking the hard questions: Are these dozens of tools actually making us more secure, or are they just burning out our security analysts and our budget?
This is leading to a massive push for real SOC transformation. The smartest leaders I talk to are no longer content with running a reactive cost center that just cleans up messes. They’re determined to build a proactive, data-driven value center that anticipates cyber threats and demonstrates clear ROI, often by replacing ten disjointed tools with three or four that work together. But getting there requires a fundamental shift in strategy.
The following security operations center best practices are the playbook for that transformation.
1. Build a Strong Foundation with the Right People and Processes
Stop hiring bodies and start building a team. Move from generalized security playbooks to methodical runbooks that combine your security analysts’ expertise with strategic automation and AI augmentation.
2. Prioritize Threat Detection and Response to Your Business Needs
It’s key to shift your team’s focus from managing alerts to actively hunting cyber threats. But with the sheer volume of today’s alerts pinging from sprawling stacks and an explosion of endpoints, the only way to free them up is by leveraging automation and AI to handle the majority of your Tier-1 alerts.
3. Automate the Mundane, Focus on the Critical
Automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks allows your limited resource of human expertise to be focused on more strategic activities, such as threat hunting and investigating complex and critical cases.
4. Embrace Continuous Improvement
The most overused wording in cybersecurity think pieces is probably “the constantly evolving threat landscape,” but the truth still stands. To keep up, SOCs must continuously improve their processes and technologies, which means regularly reviewing and updating security policies, tools, processes, and procedures, tracking and reporting KPIs, and being able to slice and dice case data to pinpoint problem areas.
5. Measure Everything
If you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it. Mean time to investigate, respond, and remediate aren’t vanity metrics — they are the vital signs of a SOC. When you can show your CISO that Hyperautomation slashed MTTI from hours to minutes (like this top 30 U.S. bank did), you’re no longer talking about a cost center; you’re talking about tangible, provable ROI.
6. Be Strategic About AI
AI is the biggest buzzword in security right now, with every vendor promising it can solve all of your problems. But it’s not a magic wand — and there’s a whole lot of AI-washed marketing out there right now. The real power of AI in the SOC is leveraging it to automate away the noise and grunt work and accelerate incident response, so your human SOC analysts can hunt cyber threats and handle complex incidents. And if an AI solution can’t prove its logic with evidence, it’s a black box that will kill trust and has no place in your SOC. See how to deploy AI in the SOC the right way.
7. Consolidate and Optimize
True optimization isn’t a “lift and shift” of your old, inefficient workflows to a new platform — it’s about fundamentally transforming your processes. Torq helps customers escape the tech debt of legacy SOAR by replacing dozens of brittle, code-heavy workflows with a handful of powerful and efficient automations built easily in Torq.
When migrating off a SOAR, Torq customers consistently consolidate their processes, achieving the same outcomes with significantly fewer and more efficient automations, often slashing their workflow count by 30% or more. Get the SOAR migration guide.
The Best SOC Tools
You can’t win today’s fight with yesterday’s technology. What’s the core solution you need to build a modern, autonomous SOC?
Torq HyperSOC
HyperSOC™ is the AI-driven platform I wish I had years ago. Designed specifically to crush the biggest challenges SOCs face, HyperSOC uses powerful, no-code automation to become the connective tissue for your entire security stack, so your cases are managed out of a single interface, and agentic AI autonomously handles 90% of Tier-1 case work.
Here’s how HyperSOC incorporates critical SOC best practices, built in:
Automates alert triage: HyperSOC ingests the flood of alerts across your stack, using automation and AI to add context, dismiss false positives, and group related alerts into a single, actionable case. It cuts through the noise so your team only sees what truly matters.
Connects your security tools: Torq has hundreds of pre-built integrations to instantly connect your SIEM, endpoint detection and response (EDR), threat intelligence, ticketing, and communication platforms into seamless, automated workflows.
Uses no-code, low-code, and AI-generated workflows: With Torq, you don’t need a team of developers to build complex automations. Torq’s drag-and-drop and AI-generated workflow-building capabilities mean anyone can create automations to handle everything from phishing investigation to endpoint containment.
Supports human-in-the-loop actions: Any AI deployed in the SOC needs to be transparent to be trustworthy. Torq makes it easy to inject human decision points into any AI workflow. Torq’s AI SOC Analyst Socrates can automatically investigate and enrich a case, then present it to a security analyst in Slack or Teams for a final decision on a critical action.
The Foundation for Transformation: Why SOC Best Practices Matter
The days of running a SOC on manual processes and sheer willpower are over. The only way to win against fast, AI-powered adversaries is to fight back with smarter, faster automation. By following security operations center best practices like prioritizing automation, empowering your team with the right tools, and quantifying outcomes through metrics, you can transform your SOC into a strategic value center.
Torq HyperSOC was designed specifically to automate and orchestrate modern SOC operations at scale. Want to learn more about how HyperSOC can help your security operations center get a whole lot more done, a whole lot faster?
Get the SOC Efficiency Guide packed with insights from my years in the trenches as a SOC leader.
MTTD vs. MTTR: Definition, Differences, & Why They Matter
By Torq
July 15, 2025
6 Minute Read
Contents
When a cyberattack occurs, every second counts. Metrics like Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) are critical benchmarks in cybersecurity, helping organizations evaluate the effectiveness of their Security Operations Centers (SOCs). But what’s the difference between MTTD vs MTTR, and why do they matter?
Understanding and improving these metrics through strategic investments in security automation can significantly elevate your security posture, minimize damage, and keep your organization safe from threats.
MTTD vs. MTTR in Cybersecurity
Mean Time to Detect and Mean Time to Respond are both fundamental KPIs in cybersecurity, but each measures something distinct.
MTTD (Mean Time to Detect) measures the average time it takes your team to identify that a security incident has occurred. This metric primarily evaluates your monitoring and detection capabilities. A lower MTTD indicates your security stack can quickly recognize anomalies and suspicious activity.
MTTR (Mean Time to Respond) (sometimes called Mean Time to Resolve) tracks the average time required to respond to and resolve an incident fully. Speed matters; a recent SANS survey found that 33% of teams take hours to respond to threats. That’s too long. A shorter MTTR reflects strong incident response procedures and an agile, responsive security team.
MTTR often involves people and a series of steps that are needed to fix the issue. While MTTD may measure how well an automated alert system performs, MTTR often measures both your systems and the people you depend on to jump into action after an incident.
Together, these metrics illustrate your SOC’s maturity and operational effectiveness. Optimizing MTTD and MTTR directly reduces risk and overall damage from cybersecurity incidents.
How Automation Improves MTTD and MTTR
Security automation plays a pivotal role in dramatically enhancing both MTTD and MTTR, empowering security teams to scale detection and response effectively by:
Improving detection: Automated systems like SIEM, EDR, and XDR can swiftly correlate vast data sets, instantly surfacing anomalous activities. Automation reduces reliance on manual log analysis, ensuring immediate, accurate threat identification.
Accelerating response: Automation streamlines and accelerates incident response workflows. Tasks like enrichment, analysis, and containment that typically consume significant analyst time become nearly instantaneous. Automation eliminates the manual “grunt work,” allowing analysts to focus solely on complex or high-risk situations.
Reducing human error: With agentic AI handling the automation, repetitive tasks become consistently executed according to predefined procedures, drastically reducing the potential for mistakes and inconsistencies in handling security incidents.
Seamless integration: Hyperautomation platforms integrate seamlessly with SIEM, EDR, and XDR tools, delivering rapid data exchange, correlation, and enriched context. This tight integration creates an end-to-end, automated security ecosystem.
In short, automation significantly shrinks the time between detecting a threat and mitigating its impact, providing an immediate, measurable boost to your SOC performance.
How to Measure MTTD & MTTR (with Formulas)
Quantifying your incident response effectiveness requires clear measurement methods. Here’s how you calculate each:
Below is some practical guidance for measuring MTTD and MTTR:
Consistent tracking: Record timestamps at every key incident stage (i.e., detection, acknowledgment, investigation, and resolution).
Aggregate metrics: Regularly aggregate these timings to spot trends or inefficiencies in your process.
Benchmarking: Establish baseline metrics to evaluate the impact of new tools, processes, or automation investments.
5 Related Incident Response Metrics You Should Know
MTTD and MTTR don’t exist in isolation. They are part of a broader landscape of incident response metrics that security teams should be tracking, including:
MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures): MTBF measures the average time between system failures. It’s useful for evaluating the reliability of security systems and predicting when future incidents might occur. A higher MTBF indicates stable security operations.
MTTF (Mean Time to Failure): MTTF tracks the average lifespan of a security tool or system component before a failure occurs. It’s commonly used to assess product reliability and helps organizations schedule proactive maintenance or upgrades.
MTTA (Mean Time to Assignment): MTTA is the average time it takes for an incident to be assigned to a specific analyst or team member after detection. Lower MTTA reduces response latency and enables teams to tackle threats more efficiently.
MTTI (Mean Time to Investigate): MTTI represents the average time taken from initial detection until the investigation is completed. Faster MTTI means threats can be understood and contained sooner, limiting potential damage.
MTTx (Mean Time to “Anything”): MTTx is a flexible metric used at Torq to track the average time to complete any defined security operation or workflow. It helps SOC teams measure efficiency across custom actions, automations, or specific tasks unique to their security processes.
Understanding these related metrics provides deeper insight into your security operations and helps identify specific bottlenecks or areas for improvement.
Key Incident Response Metrics Explained
The Hyperautomation Domino Effect in Incident Response
Improving MTTD and MTTR isn’t just about moving faster; it’s about removing the friction between each phase of the incident response lifecycle. Torq Hyperautomation connects the dots across the entire workflow — from detection to assignment, investigation to remediation — creating a seamless chain reaction of automation that compounds every efficiency. Here’s how that automation domino effect plays out in practice:
Faster detection (MTTD): Torq reduces noise by automatically filtering out low-priority alerts and surfacing real threats faster. This shrinks MTTD and ensures analysts aren’t wasting time chasing false positives.
Faster assignment (MTTA): Once a threat is detected, a case is immediately built and assigned to the right resource within Torq’s intelligent case management dashboard. Torq decides in real time whether Socrates — the AI SOC analyst that offloads 90%+ of Tier-1 cases — or a human should take the lead, dynamically reassigning ownership if the threat escalates. That means alerts don’t sit in limbo, waiting to be noticed.
Faster investigation (MTTI): By the time an analyst gets involved, much of the work is already done. Torq HyperSOC automatically enriches and correlates incident data, while AI agents generate case summaries and assign relevant case runbooks. This allows analysts to dive straight into meaningful analysis, not manual triage.
Faster response (MTTR): Response time is reduced by how quickly and efficiently action is taken. Analysts can trigger remediation with a single click or let Socrates respond autonomously in milliseconds. Whether isolating a device, disabling a user, or launching a complex remediation strategy, action happens at machine speed.
Each improvement compounds the next, like dominoes falling one after another. The faster a threat is detected and assigned to the appropriate resource, the faster those resources can be actioned. With Torq Hyperautomation, every second saved is multiplied across the incident lifecycle, delivering exponential gains in speed, accuracy, and scale.
Reduce Your MTTD and MTTR with Torq Hyperautomation
Effectively managing cybersecurity threats requires fast detection and even faster responses. Clearly differentiating MTTD vs. MTTR and understanding related metrics like MTBF, MTTF, MTTA, and MTTI enables SOC teams to target improvements strategically.
The Torq Hyperautomation™ platform offers a proven way to dramatically lower both MTTD and MTTR through real-time incident detection, streamlined automated workflows, and reduced analyst workload. Torq helps organizations minimize alert fatigue, decrease caseload per analyst, and improve overall compliance and efficiency.
Ready to drastically reduce your MTTx? Get practice advice from our Field CISO on how to make your SOC more efficient.
If you’ve been in cybersecurity longer than five minutes, you know one thing: legacy SOC architecture isn’t just showing its age — it’s creaking under the weight of today’s threats.
Cybersecurity analyst Francis Odum nailed it when presenting at Torq’s SKO 2025: “Legacy SOAR assumed everything starts in the SIEM. Now, teams connect automation directly to EDR, email, and identity systems.”.
This antiquated SOC architecture model, where every alert and log file is funneled into a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution for analysis, is too slow, too rigid, and creates too many bottlenecks to support today’s exploding security event and data pipeline. Modern SOCs need speed, scalability, and a level of intelligence that legacy architecture simply cannot provide. They need a new approach that is purpose-built for the AI era.
What is AI SOC Architecture?
AI SOC Architecture
AI SOC architecture is a modern, AI-augmented design for SOCs that decentralizes data processing, automates low-level tasks, and enables agentic systems to proactively investigate, triage, and respond to threats.
AI SOC architecture is not just about adding AI to the stack — it’s about re-architecting the stack around AI. The traditional SOC model relies on aggregating data into a centralized point of analysis before taking action. In contrast, the AI SOC places agentic, AI-powered Hyperautomation at the center of operations — integrating directly with data lakes, security tools, and workflows to create a unified, AI-native control plane. This architecture ensures a single source of AI truth, distributed evenly across the entire security stack.
Shifting the SOC Foundation
“Architecture is changing. Automation tools like Torq are being plugged directly into FDR and identity systems — not after the SIEM, but before it.”
For years, the SOC has been centered around the SIEM. Disparate security vendor solutions would feed hundreds of thousands of logs, events, and alerts into the SIEM for security analysts to manually parse through, correlate, and eventually return to the respective point solution(s) to begin the remediation process. This model created a lot of friction, leading to several chronic problems, including:
Process debt: This process would cause what we in the biz call “swivel chair syndrome,” as it often isn’t as simple as a single straight line from detection to SIEM to remediation. Instead, the lengthy investigation had analysts swiveling back and forth between the SIEM and security tools several times before reaching a conclusion hours later.
Central bottlenecks: While a centralized approach to security event management once seemed favorable, SIEM solutions were not designed for the volume of data produced by the multi-cloud environments that organizations have built — let alone the deployment of AI to help alleviate the manual filtering of that data. This creates a massive data bottleneck and, worse, a single point of failure for the SOC to rely upon.
Reactive, delayed response: In addition to scalability concerns, this is also a largely reactive approach, requiring analysts to use the SIEM to begin the manual investigation process long after an incident occurs. This slows down critical SOC reporting metrics like Mean-Time-To-Detection (MTTD) and Mean-Time-To-Response (MTTR). Legacy SOAR solutions attempted to solve this problem but did not promise faster orchestration or response times due to limited and inflexible automation playbooks.
Between sifting through an overwhelming amount of logs in a centralized SIEM solution and battling the manual efforts of legacy SOAR automation, security analysts find themselves drowning in disconnected alerts and burning out at an alarming rate.
An AI SOC architecture flips this on its head, shifting the SIEM further left in the security event lifecycle, particularly as many organizations continue to adopt a multi-SIEM strategy to offset increasing storage costs from legacy SIEM vendors.
Gartner’s recent Reference Architecture Brief: SIEM-Centric Security Operations report points out that as the industry largely shifts away from legacy SOAR solutions, it is seeing more advanced capabilities come from platforms centered around AI SOC Analysts, which produce stronger outcomes for analyst augmentation and security automation.
What Does AI-Native SOC Architecture Look Like?
In the same report, Gartner breaks down the Security Operations Center architecture into two distinct components: Security Operations Tools (e.g., SIEM and Detection-as-Code solutions) and SOC Actions (e.g., manual triage, investigation, threat hunting, and response via the SOC Team). Gartner calls out SecOps Workflow Automation, which consists of third-party automation and AI SOC analysts, bridging the gap between these two pillars of the SOC.
This is the heart of the AI-native SOC Architecture — a foundation of agentic AI and Hyperautomation built for the modern cloud-first SOC environment and designed for simplicity, extensibility, and scale.
Torq unifies security tools with AI SOC analysts and Hyperautomated workflows — streamlining triage, case management, and incident response.
Agentic AI
Agentic AI sits at the core of the AI SOC architecture. Rather than burdening human analysts with manually piecing together thousands of logs and events, an AI-native SOC leverages a multi-agent system (MAS) to handle up to 90% of Tier-1 security analysts’ tasks. These specialized AI agents have a deep understanding of the SOC environment, allowing them to plan incident response, make complex decisions, and take remediation actions autonomously.
Hyperautomation
Hyperautomation is the engine that drives autonomous response and the glue that connects agentic AI with the rest of the SOC solutions to bridge the gap between Security Operations Tools and SOC actions. With limitless no-code or AI-generated integrations, the Hyperautomation engine is the delivery system allowing agentic AI to take action, automating anything from simple alert triage to complex, multi-step incident responses.
Enterprise-Grade Security Architecture
Unlike monolithic legacy SIEM and SOAR solutions, an AI-native SOC architecture is built for cloud-first scalability and flexibility. Underpinned by an extensible security architecture, horizontal and elastic scalability allows the SOC to dynamically process and prioritize hundreds of thousands of events from various data sources, ensuring the most critical information is surfaced without interruption.
Torq’s AI SOC Architecture
Torq is built for this moment. It’s not about retrofitting AI into a legacy architecture — Torq is an enterprise-ready, AI-native platform purpose-built from the ground up to solve existential SOC challenges like alert fatigue, tech sprawl, and analyst burnout.
Torq’s AI SOC architecture begins with the ability to integrate with any solution across the entire security stack and beyond — whether it’s EDR, IAM, email phishing, threat intelligence, collaboration and communication tools, and more.
This direct integration enables agentic AI to not only take autonomous remediation actions across Tier-1 and Tier-2 security use cases but also allows AI agents to retrieve and enrich data directly from the source, regardless of what data may be missing (or difficult to find manually) from SIEM logs. As the modern SOC scales to produce tens of thousands of alerts per day, Torq’s AI-SOC architecture can seamlessly handle massive alert volumes without creating single-point bottlenecks.
HyperSOC™
Torq HyperSOC, the AI-powered autonomous SOC solution, was also explicitly designed to support AI deployment across the modern SOC. While legacy SOAR solutions have bolted-on workarounds to handle case management once an analyst has manually pulled the relevant data from a SIEM tool, Torq HyperSOC is comprised of intelligent case management and Socrates, the agentic AI SOC Analyst, embedded directly in each security case. Socrates summarizes key findings, suggests next steps, and analyzes case runbooks for autonomous remediation.
The Multi-Agent System
Socrates coordinates Torq’s multi-agent system, a team of AI Agents that can autonomously handle the vast majority of Tier-1 and Tier-2 use cases, reduce human analysts’ workload by over 95% from initial investigation to final remediation, and enable SOC teams to tackle up to 5x more security cases in a single day without adding headcount.
Socrates leads Torq’s multi-agent AI system, autonomously resolving cases, reducing analyst workload by 95%, and enabling SOC teams to handle 5x more incidents daily.
Model Context Protocol
To help Torq’s system of AI agents communicate reliably across a limitless amount of integrated security tools and other AI solutions deployed in the SOC, Torq’s AI SOC architecture also natively supports Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open protocol designed to standardize how applications provide context to AI Agents to retrieve contextual information from applications and systems.
Human-on-the-Loop AI Guardrails
Finally, this entire AI architecture is designed with the appropriate AI guardrails that provide the explainability, audibility, and control organizations require. These guardrails ensure there is always a human on the loop to avoid AI hallucinations and so SOC teams remain in control of critical decisions.
From AI-Enabled to AI-Architected
Legacy SOC architecture isn’t just outdated — it’s actively holding organizations back. True AI-native SOC architecture, like Torq HyperSOC, breaks through these barriers. It offers immediate, measurable outcomes, dramatically improving analyst effectiveness, reducing costs, and transforming security postures from reactive to proactive.
In Francis Odum’s words: “The market is ready for next-gen, AI-powered solutions. These aren’t future-state ideas; they’re delivering real-world results right now.”
The future of cybersecurity isn’t just AI-enabled; it’s AI-architected.
Get the AI or Die Manifesto to learn strategic considerations and evaluation criteria for deploying AI in the SOC from the ground up.
Tired of Security Alert Fatigue? Stop Burnout with Hyperautomation
By Torq
July 9, 2025
10 Minute Read
Contents
Every day, analysts are buried under a mountain of low-value and often meaningless alerts. And they’re expected to triage, investigate, prioritize, and respond to all of them — faster, better, and with fewer people. With this comes cybersecurity alert fatigue, which can lead to missed threats, slower response times, and SOC analyst burnout.
The good news is that SOC analysts don’t have to live like this anymore. Not if you have the right kind of AI working for you. This blog explores what security alert fatigue is, the causes, and how agentic AI can kill your SOC alert fatigue.
What is Alert Fatigue?
Cybersecurity Alert Fatigue
Alert fatigue in cybersecurity refers to the desensitization and exhaustion experienced by security analysts when they are overwhelmed by a high volume of security alerts, many of which are false positives or low-priority events. This can lead to missed or ignored true threats, potentially causing significant security incidents and breaches.
More than half of security teams say false positives are a huge problem, and 62.5% are overwhelmed by sheer data volume. Without effective triage or prioritization, it becomes harder to distinguish real threats from background noise. This leads to slower detection and response, missed incidents, and higher stress on already-stretched SOC teams, which in turn increases risk to the business.
What Causes Cybersecurity Alert Fatigue?
Alert fatigue is the result of too many notifications with too little value. And it’s a problem that only gets worse as security environments become more complex. Here’s what’s driving it.
Excessive False Positives
False positives occur when security systems incorrectly flag benign events as threats. SOC teams inundated with false positives quickly become overwhelmed and stop trusting the alerts altogether. A recent study indicated that more than half of security alerts are false positives, making analysts skeptical about their legitimacy.
Poorly Tuned Detection Rules
Security monitoring tools like SIEM and SOAR platforms rely on detection rules to trigger alerts. When these rules are not properly tuned or regularly updated, they generate an overwhelming volume of irrelevant alerts, contributing significantly to SIEM alert fatigue and SOAR alert fatigue.
Lack of Context in Alerts
Without context, analysts spend valuable time manually investigating alerts to determine their relevance and severity. Contextual information, such as user details, historical activity, and threat intelligence, is essential for quick decision-making — yet many systems fail to provide it.
Manual Triage Processes
Manually sorting through thousands of daily alerts to decide which ones require attention is tedious and error-prone. Human analysts have limits on processing speed and focus, leading to mistakes, missed threats, and inevitable burnout.
Human Limits in Processing Volume and Urgency
Human cognition has inherent limitations. When faced with a high volume of urgent tasks, analysts inevitably experience exhaustion, become less effective, and experience reduced productivity, exacerbating overall security team burnout.
Legacy SOAR
Legacy SOAR is the #1 driver of SOC alert fatigue. It’s a rigid model that treats every alert like a five-alarm fire. It floods analysts with noise, drowns them in contextless data, and racks up costs with every added integration. And because most legacy SOAR platforms are stuck on-prem, they can’t scale or flex with today’s modern security environments.
The Cost of Alert Fatigue in Cybersecurity
Missed vulnerabilities, delayed incident response: When analysts become numb to the constant flood of alerts, critical incidents can slip through unnoticed. Missed threats or delayed responses increase the likelihood of successful cyberattacks, leading to data breaches or significant operational disruptions.
Burned-out analysts and high turnover: Continuous exposure to high stress and repetitive tasks results in analyst burnout. Studies indicate that more than 70% of SOC analysts report burnout, driving skilled talent away and compounding the cybersecurity skills shortage.
Diminished trust in security systems: When false alarms dominate, analysts lose faith in their tools and processes. This lack of trust can lead to negligence or poor decision-making, ultimately undermining your entire cybersecurity posture.
Increased exposure to threats: Ignoring genuine alerts due to fatigue directly translates to higher vulnerability to cyber threats. Attackers exploit this weakness, capitalizing on diminished responsiveness to launch successful attacks.
Wasted resources: Teams overwhelmed by junk alerts often require more headcount. That’s expensive and inefficient.
Reputation damage: When a preventable breach hits the headlines, the fallout can be massive.
Legal and compliance issues: Missed threats can turn into breaches. Breaches mean SEC reporting, fines, investigations, and answering a whole lot of questions.
The average cost of a data breach was $4.9M in 2024, a 10% increase year over year. On the flip side, organizations that fully embraced security AI and automation saved an average of $2.2M compared to those that didn’t, according to IBM.
How Automation Helps You Beat Alert Fatigue
Security automation has become an essential solution for SOC teams to significantly reduce cybersecurity alert fatigue. Here’s how automation addresses the core issues.
Alert enrichment at scale: Automation enriches alerts with relevant context automatically, including threat intelligence data, historical user behavior, and asset criticality, enabling rapid and informed decisions.
Correlation and deduplication: Automation tools correlate related alerts and remove duplicates, drastically reducing noise. Analysts receive fewer but more comprehensive and meaningful incidents, improving efficiency and accuracy.
Routing to the right responder: Automated systems ensure alerts reach the appropriate analyst based on expertise, urgency, or resource availability. This eliminates delays in assignment, balances resource utilization, and improves team responsiveness.
Automated remediation of low-risk threats: Remediating low-risk incidents autonomously significantly reduces repetitive tasks. This allows analysts to prioritize their time and attention on high-severity threats.
Feedback loops for smarter alerting: AI-driven automated systems can learn from past incidents, continuously refining detection rules and processes to reduce false positives and enhance accuracy, minimizing future alert fatigue.
How To Combat Alert Fatigue
While automation is the key solution, here are other best practices your SOC team can implement to reduce alert fatigue further:
Prioritization strategies: Clearly define which alerts matter most based on business risk and prioritize accordingly.
Enhanced alert context: Invest in tools providing contextual intelligence so analysts quickly understand the nature of each alert.
Regular training and support: Ensure your team has access to continuous education and training, reinforcing resilience and reducing burnout.
Centralized management: Consolidate alerts into a single case management platform to streamline workflows and reduce duplication.
5 Benefits of Automating Cybersecurity Alert Triage
Automating alert triage doesn’t just address fatigue; it transforms your entire security operation.
80% fewer alerts reaching human analysts: Automation filters out irrelevant alerts, dramatically decreasing the number of notifications analysts need to review, significantly reducing cybersecurity fatigue.
Faster time to detect and respond (MTTD/MTTR): Automation reduces both mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR), allowing analysts to act swiftly and decisively when genuine threats appear.
Reduced analyst burnout and turnover: By offloading repetitive tasks, automation allows analysts to focus on more engaging, complex issues that require critical thinking, significantly reducing burnout and improving job satisfaction.
Higher confidence in escalated alerts: With fewer false positives and enriched context, analysts have more trust in alerts escalated to them, ensuring quick and effective response.
Measurable reduction in false positives: Automated feedback loops continuously improve detection logic, resulting in fewer unnecessary alerts over time, further reducing security alert overload.
How Torq Can Prevent Cybersecurity Alert Fatigue with Automation
Security teams have always relied on automation to streamline repetitive tasks, but traditional automation still requires substantial human oversight and manual intervention. Hyperautomation, however, elevates security operations to an entirely new level by combining advanced deterministic automations with AI-driven non-deterministic automations for real-time adaptive decision-making capabilities.
Unlike basic automation, which crumbles under the pressure of too many complex alerts, Hyperautomation handles volumes that SOAR and other legacy platforms can’t even come close to. It dynamically filters, enriches, correlates, and aggregates alerts at machine speed, ensuring analysts see what actually matters.
Torq HyperSOC™ takes Hyperautomation a step further by integrating agentic AI — an intelligent system capable of autonomous reasoning, decision-making, and iterative planning — to manage security operations at unprecedented speed and scale. Torq HyperSOC dynamically adapts, picking the most appropriate Hyperautomation workflows based on live data and context, enabling autonomous resolution of complex security issues.
Unlike traditional automation, agentic AI iteratively plans and reasons, adjusting actions based on real-time context. It automatically filters noise, enriches data, correlates related alerts, and resolves low-risk incidents without human intervention.
With agentic AI, Torq has replaced repetition with relevance. Our multi-agent system takes on the tasks that drain analysts most — triage, enrichment, correlation, case summaries, even full remediation—and executes them autonomously. Analysts no longer have to sift through countless meaningless alerts because HyperSOC escalates only those that truly require human attention. That means fewer panicked 2 a.m. Slacks and “Why am I still doing this manually?” moments.
“Torq HyperSOC is the first solution we’ve seen that effectively enables SOC professionals to mitigate issues including alert fatigue, false positives, staff burnout, and attrition.”
Up to 95% reduction in alert volume: HyperSOC automatically filters, correlates, and prioritizes alerts, drastically reducing noise for analysts.
Real-time incident remediation: Automates end-to-end response, resolving low-risk threats autonomously without human intervention.
Accelerated mean time to detect and respond (MTTD/MTTR): Identifies and addresses critical security incidents in seconds, minimizing potential damage.
Reduced analyst burnout and improved rroductivity: Offloads repetitive tasks, freeing SOC analysts to focus on high-value activities that require human expertise.
With HyperSOC, SOC analysts can finally shift from constantly firefighting false positives to focusing their expertise on high-impact threats that demand human ingenuity.
Legacy SOAR vs. Torq HyperSOC™: Solving Alert Fatigue
Here’s how Torq HyperSOC™ stacks up compared to legacy SOAR systems when it comes to solving cybersecurity alert fatigue.
Legacy SOAR
Torq HyperSOC
SOC alerts are treated like a five-alarm fire, with no intelligent prioritization
Agentic AI triages and prioritizes alerts with semantic, episodic, and procedural memory
Inflexible, SIEM-dependent pipelines for noise reduction and enrichment
Hyperautomation eliminates SIEM dependency and enriches data on the fly
Manual alert triage leads to SOC burnout and delays
AI-driven triage, investigation, and remediation reduce analyst burden
Rigid, on-prem architecture limits scalability and flexibility
Cloud-native architecture scales effortlessly with your environment
Siloed tools and alerts lack unified context
Multi-agent system correlates alerts into unified incidents with full context
Slower response times due to disconnected systems and workflows
End-to-end automation delivers sub-minute response times
High analyst turnover from alert overload and frustration
AI offloads repetitive work, reducing burnout and improving retention
By taking over the repetitive, time-consuming tasks that drive SOC burnout, agentic AI lets analysts do the work that actually matters. You know, the reason they got into security in the first place.
Hyperautomation is the Answer to Cybersecurity Alert Fatigue
The constant flood of alerts compromises response times, erodes analyst trust, causes burnout, and directly increases your organization’s cyber risk. Without addressing cybersecurity alert fatigue, your security strategy is fundamentally flawed.
Hyperautomation, driven by advanced AI, provides a decisive answer to alert fatigue. By automating routine, repetitive tasks and prioritizing real threats, it drastically enhances SOC efficiency and resilience. Torq’s HyperSOC, with its innovative agentic AI, stands at the forefront of this solution, empowering teams to work smarter, not harder.
Ready to take control of your alerts and eliminate SOC burnout once and for all? Learn how to kill your SOAR.
What is a Cloud-Native Security Automation Framework? Benefits & Use Cases
By Torq
July 3, 2025
9 Minute Read
Contents
We live in a world where infrastructures reside entirely in the cloud, threats evolve faster than ever, and attackers never sleep. Manual security processes simply can’t keep pace. Cloud-native security automation is the critical solution for organizations to secure large attack surfaces.
This blog explores cloud-native security automation, why traditional methods no longer work in modern cloud-native environments, and how teams can transition from reactive security measures to proactive Hyperautomation. Let’s explore the transformative benefits and essential strategies for implementing cloud security automation effectively.
Cloud-Native Security 101
Before you can automate cloud-native security, you need to understand what makes cloud-native security fundamentally different.
In a cloud-native security model, security is integrated from the start, woven directly into both applications and infrastructure, not tacked on later. It relies on automated controls, DevOps alignment, and security teams equipped to navigate complex, fast-moving environments. The objective is to defend against the unique risks of cloud architectures while maintaining continuous compliance with evolving standards and regulations.
What is Cloud-Native Security?
Cloud-native security is an approach that embeds security into every layer of the cloud-native stack, from infrastructure to application code. Rather than adding security as a bolt-on, it’s integrated into the DevOps lifecycle using automated tools and policies. It addresses the unique risks of dynamic, distributed, and containerized environments.
The concept is structured around the 4Cs of cloud-native security:
Cloud: The foundational infrastructure provided by cloud vendors
Clusters: The orchestration layer (e.g. Kubernetes) or other orchestrators managing containers
Containers: The isolated runtime environments housing applications
Code: The actual application logic and configurations deployed across the stack
Key use cases of cloud-native security include identity management, access control, vulnerability scanning, runtime monitoring, and automated response. Together, these create a holistic, resilient security posture that protects organizations at every level of their cloud infrastructure.
A cloud-native security automation framework is a structured set of technologies, workflows, and best practices that automatically detect, prioritize, and respond to threats across cloud-native environments. It integrates security throughout the cloud stack — cloud, clusters, containers, and code.
Manual Cloud Security is Broken: Key Challenges
Traditional security operations can’t keep up with the pace and scale of cloud-native infrastructure. Human analysts struggle to keep pace with rapidly scaling environments and managing cloud-native applications, making manual methods prone to error and inadequate against modern threats. Here are some critical issues:
Bottlenecks: Manual processes delay threat detection and response, increasing exposure to potential breaches. Each delay amplifies the damage from vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit.
Security team burnout: Analysts overwhelmed with alerts face burnout, lowering efficiency and morale, and increasing the likelihood of missed threats. This persistent stress leads to higher staff turnover and reduces overall team productivity.
Inconsistencies: Manual security procedures are difficult to replicate consistently, causing varied security effectiveness across deployments. This inconsistency can leave critical assets exposed and vulnerable to attacks.
Diagnostic difficulties: Manually correlating events across disparate tools and environments leads to slow and often incomplete investigations. Without automated analytics and correlation, incidents are frequently misunderstood or missed entirely.
Automation addresses these manual shortcomings by significantly increasing efficiency, ensuring consistent and accurate enforcement of security policies, and substantially reducing human error, especially critical in complex and rapidly evolving cloud environments.
5 Benefits of Cloud Security Automation
Cloud security automation addresses these challenges, transforming security operations into proactive, efficient, and scalable processes. Here’s why you should automate everything.
1. More Efficient Operations
Automated processes dramatically speed up threat detection, response, and remediation, reducing operational friction and freeing analysts for strategic tasks. With automation, teams can shift focus from repetitive tasks to strategic, value-adding activities. This is especially crucial in Kubernetes-based, serverless environments where threats move fast.
2. Ensure Compliance
Automation helps consistently enforce security policies, compliance standards, and best practices, ensuring your infrastructure continuously meets regulatory requirements like HIPAA, SOC 2, and PCI-DSS. Automated audit trails and compliance checks further simplify adherence to industry standards.
3. More Accuracy
Automation reduces human error, delivering precise, reliable responses to security vulnerabilities every time. Automated security processes significantly decrease false positives and misconfigurations, improving the reliability of your security operations.
4. More Consistency
Automations ensure standardized security responses, reducing variability and improving overall security posture across every container and workload. This ensures a stable security posture — regardless of scale or complexity.
5. Scalability
Security automation scales seamlessly with your infrastructure, ensuring continuous protection as your organization grows. Automation tools effortlessly handle increased workloads, ensuring continuous security coverage even during rapid scaling.
How to Automate Cloud-Native Security: 12 SOC Use Cases
A cloud-native security automation framework doesn’t just respond to threats; it transforms the way SOCs operate. Below are key use cases that demonstrate how automation accelerates security operations across cloud environments.
1. Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Automate user provisioning, access approvals, and credential rotation across cloud-native applications to minimize manual errors, prevent unauthorized access, and maintain compliance at scale.
2. Automated Threat Hunting
Continuously scan cloud workloads, Kubernetes clusters, and logs for indicators of compromise. Enrich findings with threat intelligence and behavioral analytics to detect and respond to advanced threats proactively.
3. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
Monitor multi-cloud environments for misconfigurations and policy drift. Automatically trigger remediation workflows that maintain a strong security posture and ensure compliance across dynamic cloud-native infrastructure.
4. Email Security
Integrate with cloud-based email and endpoint platforms to instantly detect phishing campaigns, quarantine malicious messages, and update protection rules, without SOC analyst intervention.
5. Self-Service Chatbots
Deploy chatbots in platforms like Slack or Teams to handle common security tasks, such as password resets or access revocations. Reduce SOC workload while improving speed and user experience.
6. Incident Response Automation
Automatically triage alerts, contain threats, execute auto-remediation, and notify stakeholders. Every step — from detection to documentation — is orchestrated for speed and accuracy across cloud-native systems.
7. Application Security Automation
Integrate with CI/CD pipelines to detect vulnerabilities and misconfigurations early. Automate fixes or escalate issues directly in tools developers already use, enabling secure cloud development without delay.
8. Phishing Detection and Response
Correlate email, endpoint, and identity signals to identify phishing attempts. Automate investigation, response, and user notifications to neutralize threats quickly and consistently.
9. Continuous Vulnerability Management
Scan containers, serverless functions, and cloud-native applications for known risks. Prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities using contextual insights, before attackers can exploit them.
10. Threat Intelligence Enrichment
Automatically enrich findings with threat intel: IP geolocation, known malware hashes, adversary infrastructure, and MITRE ATT&CK mappings. Boost detection fidelity and decision-making confidence.
11. Suspicious User Behavior
In real time, detect anomalous user activity — like impossible logins or privilege escalations. Instantly respond with MFA challenges, session termination, or account lockdown.
12. Sensitive Data Access Controls
Enforce zero trust access controls for critical assets by automating policy checks, alerting on anomalies, and verifying user actions across containerized and multi-cloud environments.
Hyperautomation: The Future of Cloud Security Automation
Looking ahead, cloud security automation will increasingly use AI to enhance detection, reduce false positives, and predict potential threats. AI-driven SOC solutions will automate complex decision-making, streamline compliance, and dynamically adapt security measures, ensuring organizations maintain resilient defenses even as threat landscapes rapidly evolve.
The future of cloud security also involves empowering non-technical stakeholders through SOC automation platforms like Torq. This democratization of security allows everyone to contribute to security practices, fostering a broader organizational security culture.
Torq HyperSOCTM is a cloud-native security automation tool, offering comprehensive, no-code solutions that enable teams to easily automate their security operations, including advanced container security, efficient management of serverless and microservices, and full integration with CNAPP capabilities.
With Torq’s no-code platform, security teams — and even non-technical stakeholders — can define rules, mitigate threats instantly, and ensure consistent security across complex multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, significantly reducing vulnerability risks and enhancing overall security posture.
By leveraging Hyperautomation and agentic AI with Torq, security teams can:
Automatically detect, investigate, and remediate threats across all cloud environments
Streamline identity and access management, CSPM, threat intel enrichment, and more
Orchestrate complex workflows across tools like Wiz, Sweet Security, CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and AWS
Scale effortlessly across cloud-native applications, multi-cloud, or hybrid environments without code or configuration overhead
Cloud-Native Security Automation in Action: Torq + Wiz
To see a cloud-native security automation framework in action, look no further than the powerful partnership between Torq and Wiz. These two platforms combine seamlessly to provide an end-to-end automation solution purpose-built for securing today’s sprawling cloud environments.
Wiz delivers deep visibility into cloud risk — surfacing everything from misconfigurations to toxic combinations of exposure and permissions. Torq turns that insight into instant, intelligent action. Together, they automate everything from detection to remediation, improving cloud security posture, reducing attack surface, and accelerating response without burdening analysts.
With Torq and Wiz, teams can automatically remediate issues like:
Publicly exposed AWS S3 bucketscontaining sensitive data: Torq receives alerts from Wiz, validates the bucket’s status, and updates access policies automatically, or routes the issue for human-in-the-loop approval via Slack or Jira.
Unencrypted cloud storage: When Wiz detects a storage bucket with encryption disabled, Torq prompts the bucket owner to enable it or does so automatically, ensuring data in the secure cloud stays secure.
Open SSH access on EC2 instances: Torq instantly correlates alerts, confirms owner identity, and applies remediation by removing the risky access rule or prompting the appropriate user to take action.
Together, Wiz Defend and Torq HyperSOC™ form a powerful defense loop for cloud-native security: Wiz delivers deep visibility and precision threat detection across dynamic environments, while Torq transforms those insights into immediate, intelligent, and fully automated response. It’s the fastest path from detection to resolution, built for the demands of modern multi-cloud, serverless, and container-driven architectures.
Ultimately, Torq and Wiz help organizations move beyond traditional security bottlenecks and into a future of truly autonomous, scalable, and resilient cloud-native operations. They are a cornerstone for any organization looking to build or strengthen a modern cloud-native application security automation framework. Watch the demo here.
Don’t Let Manual Security Hold You Back
Cloud-native environments demand cloud-native security. The only way to keep up with the speed of infrastructure — and the speed of attackers — is to automate everything that can be automated.
Modern cloud threats move fast. Detection and response has to move faster.
Wiz gives security teams the visibility and precision they need to detect real threats across sprawling cloud environments. Torq turns those threat detections into action — instantly. Together, they’re a cheat code for cloud security operations.
In this post, we break down how Torq HyperSOC™ and Wiz Defend work hand-in-hand to deliver intelligent, automated, end-to-end cloud threat detection and response that filters through alert noise — dramatically cutting MTTR and freeing analysts to focus on what matters most.
How Wiz Defend Alerts Flow into Torq
Modern cloud environments are dynamic and often opaque to traditional security tools. Wiz changes that by collecting and correlating rich telemetry across the entire cloud stack, not just from infrastructure and workloads, but from identities, repositories, runtime signals, and more.
What makes this powerful isn’t just the data itself — it’s how Wiz transforms that data into high-fidelity alerts that are seamlessly fed into Torq for immediate action.
How Wiz Finds and Detects Cloud Threats
Wiz begins by ingesting telemetry from multiple sources across your cloud footprint, including:
Cloud-native logs: AWS CloudTrail, S3 data events, Azure Diagnostic Logs, and GCP Audit Logs
Identity activity: Okta, cloud IAM policies, and role assumptions
DevOps and Kubernetes tools: GitHub, container registries, and CI/CD pipelines
Runtime sensors for visibility into container and serverless workload behavior
But rather than alerting on every anomalous signal or potentially malicious indicator, Wiz applies correlation logic that groups related signals into what it calls a Wiz Threat — a complete, narrative alert that reflects an unfolding cloud attack path.
Together, these detections are stitched into one high-confidence alert that captures both the technical indicators and the business risk, allowing SOC teams to move faster with greater certainty.
Prioritized, Correlated, and Automated Cloud Threat Detection
Each Wiz Threat is not just a set of log events — it’s a structured object that includes:
Detection metadata: source, time, cloud account, and service, region
Linked findings: secrets, misconfigurations, and vulnerabilities
Calculated risk severity based on business impact and adversary activity
This comprehensive data is packaged and passed to Torq HyperSOC via webhook or API integration.
What Gets Sent to Torq
Threat name and summary
Affected cloud assets
Event timeline and sequence
MITRE ATT&CK classification
Associated user identities and network exposure
Recommendations from Wiz’s threat intelligence team
How Socrates Automates and Orchestrates the Cloud Threat Response
Once inside Torq, the Wiz Threat becomes a case, a centralized workspace where Torq’s AI SOC Analyst, Socrates, takes over. Here’s how the end-to-end workflow looks.
Step 1: The Wiz Alert Becomes a Torq Case
When the alert lands in Torq, a new case is created and populated with structured context from Wiz Defend. Analysts are immediately presented with a dynamic AI-generated case summary, which adapts in real-time as new signals, observables, or comments are added.
Step 2: Socrates Begins Enrichment and Investigation
With the case live, Socrates, Torq’s AI SOC Analyst, steps in as the first responder. Socrates parses the detection, extracts IPs, hashes, URLs, and related indicators, and enriches them using your chosen threat intelligence providers (e.g., VirusTotal, AlienVault, Recorded Future). Threat enrichment happens within seconds, and the insights are automatically written back into the case file.
Then, Socrates dynamically identifies asset owners based on tags, CMDB entries, or environment metadata — instantly resolving ownership questions that traditionally slow down response times in cloud environments.
Next, Socrates builds a response plan. Using the MITRE ATT&CK tactics mapped from the Wiz alert and a library of security procedures, it proposes a remediation workflow customized to the threat and environment, whether it’s privilege misuse, misconfigurations, or lateral movement attempts.
Step 3: Autonomous Action and Analyst Escalation (If Needed)
Now the case enters automated execution. Socrates follows a runbook tailored to the case type, executing actions such as:
Collecting additional context from Wiz, AWS, and container workloads
Mapping and enriching security groups and cloud configurations
Identifying blast radius and lateral exposure for potential data exfiltration
Capturing a forensic memory dump of the asset to AWS S3
Notifying asset owners and cloud security teams via Slack or Jira
Removing public IP associations from exposed assets
Tagging the case with relevant MITRE ATT&CK TTPs
For cloud threats meeting certain criteria, Socrates can auto-remediate the incident entirely, containing the issue before a human even sees the alert. For more critical threats, the case is escalated to a human analyst with full context, including recommended next steps and suggested actions.
Step 4: Automatic Post-Incident Reporting
Once the threat has been handled, Socrates generates a full post-incident report that includes:
A summary of the detection and context
Enrichment and investigation details
The full remediation timeline
Root cause analysis of vulnerabilities or misconfigurations
Blast radius insights
Analyst performance scoring (if applicable)
Recommendations for continued improvement of cloud security posture
This report is stored as a PDF attachment to the case and accessible as a structured note, ready for audits, compliance, and continuous SOC training.
As the final touch, Torq automatically tags the case with MITRE ATT&CK TTPs used in the attack. This enables teams to build a MITRE ATT&CK heatmap across Wiz, Torq, and other detection sources, giving CISOs and threat hunters strategic visibility into adversary behavior across cloud and hybrid infrastructure.
Why Torq is the Definitive Automation Tool for Your Wiz Environment
Torq is uniquely built to provide the critical automation layer needed to bridge detection to action with unparalleled efficiency and accuracy. Unlike generic automation tools or manual scripting, Torq understands Wiz alerts natively. As soon as Wiz identifies a high-confidence threat, Torq’s built-in workflows are triggered automatically without extra scripting, manual integrations, or complicated setup.
With Torq, Wiz Defend customers experience immediate threat containment asSocrates enriches alerts, performs investigations, and resolves threats independently. This fully autonomous approach significantly reduces MTTR and frees your analysts to focus on complex scenarios and overall SOC strategy.
Torq doesn’t just enhance Wiz cloud alerts — it completes them.
Wiz and Torq: Your Ultimate Cheat Code for Cloud Security Operations
Cloud threat detection is just half the battle. Together, Wiz and Torq close the loop by coupling high-fidelity detections with instant, automated, and intelligent response. By bridging the gap between detection and action, security teams can finally stay ahead of rapidly evolving cloud threats, reduce alert fatigue, and accelerate remediation.
The integration of Wiz Defend’s rich, correlated telemetry with Torq HyperSOC’s autonomous threat handling isn’t just a solution — it’s your SOC team’s ultimate cheat code.
See Wiz Defend and Torq HyperSOC in action together.
