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Legacy SOAR isn’t the only casualty in cybersecurity. The era of “best efforts” in federal cybersecurity ended in 2025. The Salt Typhoon campaigns made sure of that.
Throughout 2025, adversaries planted spyware and stole sensitive data from critical infrastructure, telecom, and federal IT assets. 2026 will be worse — AI-driven threats are coming for agencies that aren’t prepared. Executive Order 14028 has turned autonomous orchestration from a competitive advantage into a mandate.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Federal agencies have the tools. SIEMs. EDR. Firewalls. But when threat actors move from access to lateral movement in under 90 minutes, manual playbooks won’t save you. You’re bringing human-speed response to an AI-speed fight.
The tools aren’t failing you. The gaps between them are.
Hyperautomation changes that, not as another tool, but as the autonomous orchestration layer that makes your stack work at adversary speed. And at the speed federal law now demands.
Why Legacy Tools Weren’t Built for This Fight
Federal security teams know the pain. Legacy SOAR platforms promised automation but delivered something else: complex deployments requiring specialized coding skills, rigid playbooks that break with every infrastructure change, and an inability to scale when alert volumes spike (for a deeper dive on why this model is broken, read The SOAR is Dead Manifesto).
The compliance burden makes it even worse.
- NIST RMF requirements demand continuous monitoring across hundreds of controls.
- NERC CIP mandates rigorous documentation for utilities.
- FISMA reporting cycles consume analyst hours that should be spent hunting threats.
Every manual process creates a security gap. Time spent documenting is time not spent defending.
Not to mention, the staffing math doesn’t work. Federal cyber workforce shortages persist while threat volumes multiply. You can’t hire your way out of a problem that requires machine-speed response.
Vendors built legacy SOAR for a different era, one where analysts had time to build custom Python scripts, and threats moved slowly enough to allow deliberate response.
That era is over.
The Essential Cybersecurity Tool Stack for 2026
It’s time to stop thinking about security tools as a checklist and to start thinking about them as an integrated system with distinct functions.
That’s exactly what Torq delivers: an autonomous Hyperautomation layer that unifies your SIEM, EDR, identity tools, and cloud security platforms into a single, orchestrated defense system. Call it your legacy SOAR replacement.
Here’s a breakdown of an integrated system starting at the top:
1. Hyperautomation
This is the orchestration layer that transforms your security stack from a collection of point solutions into a unified defense system. Torq Hyperautomation™ amplifies your systems and tools by automating the data flow, decision-making, and response actions that currently require human intervention.
The difference from legacy SOAR? A customizable workflow design that security analysts can build and modify without waiting on engineering resources. Native cloud architecture that scales to handle massive event volumes. And AI-driven decision support that accelerates triage without removing human judgment from critical decisions.
For example, when Check Point deployed Torq, they eliminated alert fatigue despite a 30% manpower gap.
2. Modern SIEM and Data Lakes
Visibility remains foundational, but visibility alone isn’t enough. No more “swivel-chairing” to multiple screens and dashboards. Whether you’re running Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, Elastic, or a combination, your SIEM is only as valuable as your ability to act on what it sees.
The challenge is turning that data into action fast enough to matter. When the Hyperautomation layer integrates directly with your SIEM, alerts trigger automated enrichment, correlation, and initial response before an analyst even opens the ticket.
3. EDR and XDR
Endpoint detection and response tools like CrowdStrike and SentinelOne provide the enforcement capability your security operations need. But isolation and remediation only happen if the signal gets through the noise and reaches the right response workflow.
Here’s where integration becomes critical. Hyperautomation connects your detection capabilities to your response capabilities with no manual handoffs, no copy-paste between consoles, and no delays while analysts context-switch between tools.
4. Unified Orchestration
The real power emerges when these layers work together automatically. Consider NIST RMF evidence collection, typically a manual exercise consuming hundreds of analyst hours per authorization cycle. With Torq Hyperautomation, every security action generates documentation. Every control assessment pulls live data from your actual security tools. Continuous monitoring becomes continuous by default, not as an aspiration.
This type of system is how organizations like BigID achieve 10x efficiency gains. As their CISO noted, work that would normally require ten security engineers now needs just one or two, with Torq Hyperautomation handling the orchestration.
Use Cases That Matter for Federal Agencies and Utilities
Automated NIST and CISA Compliance
Compliance shouldn’t mean choosing between security and documentation. When security workflows automatically log actions, capture evidence, and update control status, you get both.
Picture this: An incident triggers automated response. The workflow contains the threat, collects forensic data, and notifies stakeholders, while simultaneously documenting every action, timestamping it, and mapping it to relevant NIST 800-53 controls.
Your next audit prep just got significantly shorter.
Phishing Response at Scale
Large federal agencies and utilities face thousands of reported suspicious emails monthly. Each report requires triage, investigation, and potential remediation. Traditional approaches create backlogs that leave threats active while analysts work through queues.
Hyperautomation transforms phishing investigation and response. Automated analysis identifies genuine threats within seconds. The system quarantines malicious messages across the organization automatically. Users receive immediate feedback. Analysts focus on the complex cases that actually need human judgment.
Lennar’s security team experienced this directly — phishing remediations that previously consumed hours are now completed in minutes.
IT/OT Convergence for Critical Infrastructure
Utilities face a unique challenge: securing operational technology environments that engineers never designed for connectivity, now increasingly integrated with IT networks. When an alert fires in your OT monitoring system, can your IT security team respond appropriately? Can they respond fast enough?
Hyperautomation bridges this gap by orchestrating response across both environments.
An anomaly detected in an industrial control system can trigger IT-side investigation, OT-side containment, and coordinated notification, without requiring analysts to manually pivot between disconnected tools.
5 Questions Federal CISOs Must Ask Their Vendors
Before your next security investment, get clear answers to these questions:
1. Can this solution deploy on-prem, in government cloud, and in hybrid configurations? Federal environments have strict data residency requirements. Solutions that only work in commercial cloud may not meet your compliance needs.
2. Does it require proprietary coding languages or specialized development skills? If building a new workflow requires Python expertise and weeks of development, you’ve just created a bottleneck. Look for no-code or low-code approaches that put automation capability in the hands of your security analysts.
3. Can it sustain 1M+ daily security events without performance degradation? Federal agencies generate massive event volumes. Proof-of-concept environments rarely match production scale. Demand evidence of enterprise-scale deployments.
4. How does it integrate with our existing tools? Generic “API support” claims mean nothing. Ask for demonstrated integrations with your actual SIEM, EDR, identity provider, and ticketing system. Look for pre-built connectors, not promises.
5. What is the realistic deployment timeline to first value? Legacy SOAR implementations often stretch 12-18 months before delivering meaningful automation. Modern Hyperautomation platforms like Torq show value in weeks. Valvoline saw results within 48 hours of deployment.
Ready to ditch your legacy SOAR? Here’s how to migrate.
The Year of Autonomous Defense
2026 will test federal security operations like never before. AI-powered threats will move faster than human-speed response can counter. Nation-state actors will continue targeting critical infrastructure. Compliance requirements will expand while budgets and staffing remain constrained.
The agencies and utilities that thrive will embrace autonomous defense, amplifying human capabilities with machine-speed automation. Torq is accelerating this mission. A $140M Series D led by Merlin Ventures — a firm with nearly 30 years bringing technologies to the U.S. government — gives Torq the strategic support and deep government relationships to navigate FedRAMP and scale across Federal and Public Sector markets.
Your security stack already has the tools. Torq Hyperautomation is the missing layer that makes them work together.
Ready to achieve autonomy for your federal security operations? Get the Don’t Die, Get Torq manifesto.
FAQs
Legacy SOAR often requires heavy coding and manual upkeep, which fails in the high-stakes environment of IT/OT convergence. Hyperautomation provides a customizable orchestration layer that allows utility operators to automate security across both traditional IT assets and industrial control systems (ICS) without needing a dedicated team of software engineers to maintain the scripts.
Executive Order 14028 mandates that federal agencies modernize their cybersecurity through Zero Trust Architecture and standardized incident response playbooks. Hyperautomation supports this by acting as the connection that automates these playbooks across disconnected tools, ensuring that response actions are executed at machine speed as required by CISA’s federal cybersecurity guidelines.
Torq offers 300+ pre-built integrations with leading SIEMs, EDR/XDR platforms, identity providers, and cloud security tools, including Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, CrowdStrike, Okta, and more.
Yes. Hyperautomation platforms like Torq turn compliance from a manual audit into an “always-on” process. By integrating directly with your security stack, the platform can automatically orchestrate evidence collection for third-party compliance solutions. Torq AI Agents and Hyperautomation also turn NIST-800-53 controls, like Incident Response (IR), into automated, defined and repeatable processes while documenting every action in real-time.
