What is Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR)? Why Hyperautomation is Better

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) promised streamlined workflows, rapid incident responses, and reduced security analyst workloads. But as cybersecurity threats grow more sophisticated, legacy SOAR solutions revealed their critical limitations. Static, rigid workflows and cumbersome integration processes have left many SOCs overwhelmed, struggling with slow response times, high security alert fatigue, and fragmented security toolsets.

Today, traditional SOAR platforms are becoming obsolete, unable to keep pace with rapidly evolving cyber threats. Legacy SOAR solutions typically rely on static playbooks and manual script updates, which quickly become outdated, failing to adapt dynamically to new threats or changing environments. Additionally, traditional SOAR platforms often come with steep learning curves, extensive deployment timelines, and hidden cost, which limit their practicality and reduce their overall ROI.

Hyperautomation and advanced agentic AI tools like Torq offer a powerful alternative, transforming security operations by automating dynamically, intelligently, and at scale. Unlike legacy SOAR, Hyperautomation provides flexibility with no-code workflows, real-time contextual enrichment, and seamless integrations, eliminating the need for extensive manual intervention and continuous maintenance. By leveraging advanced AI-driven tools, SOC teams can proactively manage threats, dramatically reduce analyst fatigue, and significantly improve response times.

What is SOAR in Cybersecurity?

SOAR is composed of three components: 

1. Orchestration: Orchestration connects disparate security tools into a cohesive ecosystem. SOAR tools coordinate actions and share data across multiple platforms by integrating various security solutions..
2. Automation: Automation enables SOC teams to execute repetitive security tasks without human intervention. Common automated actions include blocking IP addresses, isolating infected endpoints, or generating reports..
3. Response: Security orchestration and automation provide the foundation for response. Response is where detection turns into action.

How Does SOAR Work?

Data collection: SOAR aggregates alerts and telemetry from SIEMs, firewalls, cloud environments, endpoints, and threat intelligence sources to provide centralized visibility.

Data analysis: It applies correlation rules or basic machine learning to identify indicators of compromise (IOCs), anomalies, or attack patterns.

Enrichment: Alerts are enriched with contextual data like user behavior, asset value, or known threat intelligence to support investigation.

Triage and investigation: Automated playbooks classify incidents by type or severity. Analysts manually investigate with supporting evidence and logs.

Response: Once verified, predefined playbooks carry out static actions like isolating devices, disabling accounts, or opening IT tickets.

By orchestrating and automating these stages, SOAR platforms aimed to improve incident response times, reduce human error, and standardize security operations. However, traditional SOAR often falls short due to rigid playbooks, brittle integrations, and high maintenance requirements.

Why SOAR Fell Short — and How Hyperautomation Delivers

SOAR was supposed to be the silver bullet for overloaded SOCs, promising faster response, streamlined workflows, and fewer manual tasks. But, in practice, legacy SOAR platforms introduced new complexity, slowed response times, and failed to adapt to real-world threats.

Torq Hyperautomation™ was purpose-built to fix what SOAR broke. It eliminates the inflexible playbooks, easy-to-break integrations, and alert overload that plague traditional platforms, replacing them with intelligent, adaptable workflows that actually deliver on the promise of automation. Here’s how they compare.

Response Time to Incidents

Reality: SOAR workflows are code-heavy, slow to implement, and difficult to adapt, significantly limiting response speed.

Torq Advantage: Torq uses real-time, no-code/low-code workflows that adapt instantly, enabling immediate response without extensive engineering or programming expertise.  Security teams can respond to threats the moment they’re detected, without delays.

Analyst Fatigue

Reality: SOAR solutions require extensive manual setup, continuous maintenance, and scripting, further burdening analysts.

Torq Advantage: Torq’s AI-assisted automation is ready out-of-the-box and requires minimal upkeep, significantly alleviating SOC analyst fatigue by automatically handling repetitive tasks.

Fewer False Positives

Reality: Static correlation rules in legacy SOAR platforms often lack necessary context, resulting in a high volume of false positives that inundate analysts.

Torq Advantage: Torq dynamically enriches alerts with real-time, contextual intelligence, automatically prioritizing legitimate threats and dramatically reducing false positives.

Centralized Visibility and Control

Reality: Legacy SOAR platforms typically require cumbersome custom integrations, causing data silos and fragmented visibility.

Torq Advantage: Torq integrates seamlessly with hundreds of security tools, delivering immediate unified visibility and actionable insights from the start.

Collaboration Across Teams

Reality: SOAR isolates SOC teams with dashboards that don’t effectively bridge departmental gaps or workflow handoffs.

Torq Advantage: Torq proactively shares enriched alerts and contextual data directly via collaboration tools like Slack, Jira, and Teams, enabling cross-departmental efficiency and accelerated decision-making.

Efficiency and ROI on Existing Security Tools

Reality: Complex SOAR deployments often result in shelfware due to their slow implementation, limited scalability, and difficulty in maintenance, severely restricting efficiency and ultimately ROI.

Torq Advantage: Torq provides immediate deployment, effortless scalability, increased SOC efficiency, and continuous enhancement of existing security tools, resulting in quick, measurable ROI improvements.

SIEM Integration

Reality: Legacy SOAR systems were meant to complement SIEM by responding to alerts faster. Instead, they add friction, slowing down triage and overwhelming analysts with manually tuned workflows that can’t scale with modern SIEM telemetry.

Torq Advantage: Torq seamlessly ingests SIEM alerts and enriches them with real-time context from across the security stack, automatically prioritizing, triaging, and triggering response workflows without manual effort. It transforms SIEM data from noise into action, accelerating time-to-response and eliminating the bottlenecks SOAR was supposed to solve.

Repeatable, Scalable Response Workflows

Reality: Static SOAR playbooks become outdated and ineffective as threats evolve and environments shift.

Torq Advantage: Torq’s dynamic workflows adapt automatically, staying continuously effective in combating evolving threats and environmental changes, ensuring resilience and scalability for any size organization.

Threat Intelligence Automation and Utilization

Reality: Traditional SOAR tools struggle to utilize threat intelligence effectively, resulting in missed opportunities for proactive measures and a reactive security posture

Torq Advantage: Our platform automatically correlates threat feeds with real-time alerts and events, instantly enriching cases with context that would otherwise take hours to collect. Analysts get a full picture of the threat landscape without leaving their workflow, enabling faster, smarter decisions and more successful threat hunting.

Integrated Vulnerability Management

Reality: SOAR platforms keep vulnerability management in a silo, disconnected from the broader incident response cycle. 

Torq Advantage: Torq bakes vulnerability management directly into incident response. Our platform continuously pulls in vulnerability data, prioritizes it based on live threat intelligence, and automates the next best action — whether that’s patching, escalating, or isolating impacted systems. That means zero delay between discovering a weakness and neutralizing it.

Optimized Threat Hunting Capabilities

Reality: Threat hunting with SOAR often means toggling between tools, manually stitching together clues, and hoping nothing slips through the cracks. It’s slow, disjointed, and easy to get wrong.

Torq Advantage: Torq brings everything together, from data sources to actions, in a single, Hyperautomated workflow. Analysts can launch cyber threat hunts with one click, rely on Torq to handle enrichment and correlation, and focus their time on analysis and response. 

Keep Up With Threats You Haven’t Seen Yet

Reality: As cyber threats continue to evolve, traditional SOAR solutions are unable to keep pace, leaving SOC teams at a disadvantage. 

Torq Advantage: Torq HyperSOC^TM is built for change. With a no-code interface, AI architecture, and agentic AI, SOC teams can adapt to new threats in minutes. Whether onboarding a new tool, facing a new TTP, or launching an entirely new use case, Torq gives the agility to do it at machine speed.

The Pitfalls and Shortcomings of Traditional SOAR Platforms

So, where did SOAR go wrong? Despite its early promise, legacy SOAR platforms are buckling under the weight of today’s security demands, plagued by technical debt, operational friction, and outdated architecture. Here’s where they fall short:

• Steep learning curve and complexity: SOAR solutions often require specialized knowledge, making them difficult and time-consuming to deploy and manage.
• Static playbooks: Playbooks built in traditional SOAR tools lack flexibility, quickly becoming outdated and ineffective.
• Poor integrations and limited interoperability: Integration complexities frequently result in limited interoperability, leaving critical data fragmented across isolated tools.
• Disconnected tools, fragmented data: Despite promises of centralization, many SOAR platforms leave vital security tools disconnected, exacerbating inefficiencies.
• Alert overload: Without dynamic context, traditional SOAR platforms struggle to differentiate legitimate threats from noise, overwhelming security analysts.
• Long implementation timelines: Implementing SOAR solutions can take months, significantly delaying any potential benefits.
• High cost with limited ROI: Legacy SOAR investments often fail to deliver sufficient value due to high upfront costs, ongoing maintenance expenses, and poor usability.

SOAR is Dead, Thanks to Hyperautomation

As cybersecurity threats grow more advanced and SOC teams face escalating pressure, legacy SOAR simply can’t keep up. Torq’s Hyperautomation platform replaces outdated SOAR with a smarter, faster, and far more adaptive solution. Built for the modern SOC, it combines AI-native automation, limitless integrations, and scalable cloud architecture to solve problems SOAR was never designed to address.

Torq Hyperautomation transcends traditional SOAR capabilities by introducing:

• Hyperautomation and dynamic workflows: Unlike traditional SOAR platforms with rigid, linear playbooks, Torq’s Hyperautomation workflows are built to support complex logic. This enables security teams to design multiple response paths within a single workflow. This allows teams to easily look for exceptions, outliers, and conditional scenarios without rewriting or reconfiguring playbooks each time a threat or environment changes. 
• No-code/low-code integrations: Security teams can integrate any tool or data source in minutes, eliminating the development bottlenecks and vendor lock-in associated with traditional SOAR.
• AI-assisted decision-making: Torq’s multi-agent system, led by Socrates the AI SOC Analyst, doesn’t just follow rules — it plans, adapts, and makes autonomous decisions based on contextual awareness. It handles most Tier-1 tasks without human input and elevates complex cases with intelligent summaries and prioritization.
• Context-aware playbooks: Legacy SOAR relies on static if/then logic. Torq replaces that with workflows that adjust actions based on threat intelligence, user identity, behavioral context, and risk level.
• Cloud-native, scalable architecture: SOAR’s monolithic architecture creates scaling headaches and performance ceilings. Torq’s elastic, event-driven architecture scales horizontally with guaranteed SLAs, real-time API sync, and zero performance degradation, whether you’re processing 10 events per hour or 10,000 per second.

The result is a complete transformation of security operations. Hyperautomation doesn’t just automate response; it enables continuous detection, intelligent triage, enriched case management, and full-lifecycle resolution.

Where SOAR added layers of complexity, Torq removes them. Where SOAR overwhelmed security analysts, Torq augments them. And where SOAR promised outcomes it couldn’t deliver, Torq is delivering those outcomes.

Move Beyond SOAR to Hyperautomation

While SOAR was a significant step forward in security automation, its limitations are evident. Modern SOC teams require dynamic, adaptive, and intelligent tools that can scale effortlessly and deliver immediate value.

Hyperautomation, as delivered by Torq, empowers SOCs to achieve true operational agility, dramatically faster response times, and improved overall security posture, without the complexity and rigidity of traditional SOAR.

Luckily, if you’re already using a SOAR platform, Torq makes migration effortless. Torq Hyperautomation can ingest your existing workflows, integrate with your current tools, replicate, and radically improve your existing use cases.