AI

AI-Powered SOCs, Explained

By Torq
October 16, 2024
7 Minute Read
What is an AI SOC? Get the definition, components, use cases, and benefits of an AI-powered security operations center.

Contents

Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are the command center of an organization’s frontline cybersecurity defenses — responsible for monitoring threats, prioritizing alerts, and orchestrating remediation. However, today’s SOCs are facing an existential crisis: an overwhelming volume of increasingly complex and sophisticated threats combined with a shortage of skilled analysts. This perfect storm is pushing SOCs to their breaking point, burning out their teams and leaving their organizations vulnerable.

Legacy security solutions struggled to keep up with the evolving threat landscape, especially at scale. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has been hailed as a game-changer for SOCs, offering the potential for unprecedented efficiency gains.

But what does effective use of AI in the SOC look like? Below, we show top use cases for leveraging AI in the SOC and explore how AI is transforming security operations.

What is an AI SOC?

An AI-powered SOC is a security operations center that leverages artificial intelligence to automate processes, enhance threat detection, accelerate incident response, provide contextual insights, and optimize resource allocation —  resulting in greater efficiency and accuracy, improved decision-making, faster time to remediation, and a more proactive security posture.

The technical foundations of an AI-powered SOC

Security automation has evolved way past SOAR — with Hyperautomation and AI integration forming the new cornerstones of the modern autonomous SOC. Core components of AI used in SOC operations include:

  • Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs): These technologies can process vast amounts of security data to intelligently generate deeper threat insights, remediation recommendations, contextual case summaries, and new security workflows.
  • AI-driven Hyperautomation: By seamlessly integrating your security stack and instantly automating any security process using thousands of pre-built integration steps and AI-generated workflows, Hyperautomation offloads routine tasks, reduces analyst burnout, and accelerates threat response.
  • Natural Language Agents: AI SOC analysts can automate incident response by interpreting natural language instructions in security playbooks to execute tasks such as alert triage, containment, and remediation actions. Human analysts remain in charge of the processes and outcomes and can interface with AI agents using natural language for additional enrichment, investigation, and recommended next steps.

Top use cases for AI in the SOC

By analyzing vast amounts of data from across your security stack and executing intelligent automations, AI unlocks efficiency gains across SOC functionalities such as:

  • Incident investigation: Analyze massive volumes of alerts to identify patterns, suppress low-fidelity alerts, and automate triage and validation, accelerating the investigation process from start to resolution. 
  • Case management: Streamline the process of prioritizing, tracking, and managing security incidents by intelligently enriching and automating cases.
  • Workflow generation: Prompt AI with a natural language description of your use case to instantly build security automation workflows — no code required.
  • Case summarization: Analyze all relevant data points associated with a security alert to provide easy-to-digest, evidence-backed summaries of complex security cases, improving SOC analysts’ efficiency and collaboration.
  • Documentation: Automatically generate documentation for complex automated processes.
  • Executive reporting: Prompt the system to generate case info in the right tone and level of information for a specific persona, such as for a non-technical executive or board member. 
  • Team collaboration: Automatically alert Slack channels when a case is resolved.
  • Resource optimization: Use AI to assign cases to an available analyst based on workload and shift schedules. 
  • Data correlation: Combine and correlate data from all of the tools in your security stack, providing a holistic view of your security environment.
  • Threat response: Automate tasks like threat detection and containment for faster incident resolution.

How do AI-powered SOCs transform traditional security operations? 

Scaling SOC operations: AI can handle an influx of security events: triaging, investigating, and remediating the majority of Tier-1 and Tier-2 alerts. This frees up analyst bandwidth to focus on urgent incidents and strategic projects, enabling SOCs to efficiently scale their operations without increasing headcount (which is vital amidst today’s shortage of skilled cybersecurity talent).

Shifting to a proactive security posture: AI goes beyond just detecting and counteracting attacks by applying real-time intelligence to identify patterns and detect emerging threats. This allows SOCs to adopt a less reactive, more preemptive approach to address vulnerabilities before they can be exploited or breached. 

Reducing alert fatigue and analyst burnout: By autonomously triaging alerts and reducing false positives, AI reduces the number of irrelevant alerts that analysts must wade through. And, by automating tedious, repetitive tasks and auto-remediating most low-level alerts, AI helps senior analysts gain back the time and capacity to focus on more rewarding work like strategic projects. 

Speeding up MTTR: All of the efficiency gains from leveraging AI in the SOC translates to more alerts resolved, faster. 

Will AI replace humans in the SOC?

Adopting AI in the SOC is not about replacing human SOC analysts — it’s about augmenting and empowering them. With a looming 4 million+ cybersecurity talent shortage, organizations must not only retain their existing analysts, but also help them work more efficiently. On top of that, organizations are recognizing that human-only defenses are inadequate to counter the evasive and persistent threats posed by AI-driven attacks.

AI reduces analyst burnout: AI can reduce the strain on SOC teams by offloading rote tasks, auto-remediating the majority of Tier 1 tickets, and upleveling the skills of junior analysts. This frees up senior analysts to focus their expertise on critical threats and strategic projects to help their organization achieve a stronger security posture overall.

Human expertise must remain the final line of defense: Done the right way, AI-powered SOCs keep humans “in the loop” as the ultimate decision-makers for high-stakes threats following rigorous, multi-tiered AI evaluation and case enrichment that helps human analysts take informed, decisive action.

“By 2028, AI in threat detection and incident response will rise from 5% to 70%, to primarily augment, not replace staff.” 

Source: Gartner Inc.

How Torq’s AI capabilities supercharge SecOps

Torq has been very deliberate in how we’ve extended the capabilities of the Torq platform using AI to solve real problems for SOCs with products and features like:

  • AI Workflow Builder: Simply describe your desired security automation workflow in natural language, and Torq’s AI Workflow Builder will generate a tailored solution in seconds. Rather than spending hours manually building workflows from scratch, your team is freed up to focus on more strategic security initiatives.
  • AI Case Summaries: Help your team make the right decisions quickly by presenting them with a concise, insightful, and verifiable AI-generated summary of each case. No more wading through pages of logs and incident details! The easy-to-read summaries empower SOC teams to work faster, make informed decisions with confidence, and seamlessly transition between shifts by giving the incoming team clear case context backed by citations.
  • Socrates, the AI SOC Analyst: Socrates intelligently automates alert triage, incident investigation, and response, extending your SOC teams’ capabilities and improving response times across the board. Socrates can autonomously execute runbooks written in natural language, auto-remediating 95% of cases within minutes. For critical cases that require human intervention, your analysts can collaborate with Socrates using natural language to summarize case details, enrich cases with additional investigation and threat intelligence, and trigger remediation workflows.
  • AI Data Transformation: Simplify complex data manipulation for security operations by easily transforming complex JSON data using natural language — no coding required. Each transformation is broken down into precise, testable micro-transformations that users can edit, validate, and modify individually.

The future of the SOC: Better, faster human decision making through AI automation and insights

When deployed effectively, AI in the SOC extends and enhances the capabilities of your existing staff so they can make better decisions, faster. 

So, what does the future of SOC automation look like? Sophisticated AI technology continuously learning from historical data and real-time incidents to generate insights and recommendations, automate routine security tasks, and auto-remediate the majority of alerts, with a top layer of human analysts providing strategic oversight for critical cases. This means faster, more proactive responses to threats and vulnerabilities — and a more secure future for organizations everywhere.

Want to learn how Torq transforms SOC operations with AI-driven Hyperautomation? Explore HyperSOC.

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Building Trust in AI: Structured, Evidence-Backed Summaries for Seamless SOC Shift Transfers

By Gal Peretz
October 4, 2024
6 Minute Read
A key area for building trust in AI in the SOC? Ensuring that AI-generated summaries have the right structure and evidence to ensure seamless SOC shift transfers.

Contents

Gal Peretz, Head of AI & Data at Torq

Gal Peretz is Head of AI & Data at Torq. Gal accelerates Torq’s AI & Data initiatives, applying his vast expertise in deep learning and natural language processing to advance AI-powered security automation. He also co-hosts the LangTalks podcast, where he discusses the latest in AI and LLM technologies. 

Staying ahead of evolving cyber threats means more than just keeping up — it means outsmarting the adversary with intelligent, proactive solutions that supercharge your team. This blog kicks off our latest series focused on building trust in AI in Security Operations Centers (SOCs).

As we navigate this new era of AI, Torq recognizes that integrating intelligent systems into existing security workflows is both new and essential. And it can’t be just deploying advanced technology, it’s about building solutions that seamlessly collaborate with your team and earn their trust. Our mission is to create AI systems that enhance efficiency while embedding naturally into daily operations like SOC shift handoffs, ensuring that technology and human expertise work hand in hand.

The Challenge of Relying on Naive Summarizations in SOC Shift Handovers

Consider a scenario where an outgoing SOC team provides an AI-generated summary during a shift handover. The summary reads:

“A phishing alert was reported by an employee regarding an email from [email protected] with the subject ‘Your package is ready, needs to be released from customs.’ The email passed DMARC and SPF checks but contained several red flags indicating a phishing attempt.” [figure 1]

At first glance, this summary appears concise and informative, but the trained eye will notice it lacks more critical structure and detail. It doesn’t specify what exactly happened beyond a general phishing alert, when the events took place, or how the conclusion of a phishing attempt was reached. Moreover, it fails to cite any original evidence or analyses that support its findings. 

This absence of structured information and verifiable evidence leaves the incoming team with unanswered questions like: 

  • Which systems were affected?
  • What specific red flags were identified? 
  • Were there malicious attachments or links that need immediate attention?

Without this crucial information, the incoming team may misinterpret the severity of the threat or overlook essential steps needed for mitigation. The lack of evidence-backed details also opens the door for AI hallucinations — incorrect or fabricated information generated by AI — which can mislead the team into focusing on the wrong areas. 

Instead of facilitating a smooth transition, the unstructured and unsupported summary creates confusion, delays response times, and potentially allows the threat to persist or escalate.

Example of how a naive AI-generated case summary doesn't have enough information for reliable SOC shift transfers
Figure 1: Naive Case Summary Doesn’t Cut It for Reliable SOC Shift Transfers

The Torq Standard: Structured, Evidence-Backed Summaries

Now, imagine the same scenario we just discussed, this time the outgoing SOC team provides an AI-generated, structured, and evidence-backed summary. The summary is organized into clear sections — What happened, When it happened, and How it happened — each supported by direct citations to original forensic evidence.

“What happened: A phishing alert was reported by an employee regarding an email purportedly from [email protected] with the subject “Your package is ready, needs to be released from customs” [1]. The email contained malicious attachments (invoice.doc and QRCode.png) and included a suspicious link (hXXps://wood82c2[.]jayden1077[.]workers[.]io/c64ed9ed-b68b-4f61-b26e-20d32f0f13ab) [1]. The ‘Reply-To’ address differed from the ‘From’ address, indicating a potential phishing attempt [2].

When it happened: The phishing email was reported on August 5, 2024 [1]. Subsequent analyses and confirmations occurred between August 24 and September 2, 2024 [3][4][5][6].

How it happened: The email passed DMARC and SPF checks, but the discrepancy in the ‘Reply-To’ field raised suspicion [2]. Email body analysis flagged several phishing indicators: a non-legitimate link, a demand for information via a link, a false sense of urgency, and a lack of sender details [3][4]. Sandbox analysis of the attachments confirmed them as malicious, detecting unauthorized network activity and potential application crashes [5][6].” [Figure 2]

Citations:

  1. Phishing Alert Email received by an employee, dated August 5, 2024.
  2. Email Header Analysis Report, conducted on August 24, 2024.
  3. Email Body Content Analysis Summary, dated August 25, 2024.
  4. Suspicious Email Indicators Checklist, referenced on August 26, 2024.
  5. Attachment Scan Results from Antivirus Software, dated August 30, 2024.
  6. Sandbox Analysis Report of Email Attachments, completed on September 2, 2024.

With this structured summary and direct citations, the incoming team can quickly grasp the situation’s full context. They have immediate access to the supporting evidence, allowing them to validate the AI’s conclusions and understand the threat’s specifics without delay. This reduces the risk of misinterpretation and ensures that critical details aren’t overlooked.

The inclusion of citations linking back to original forensic evidence not only mitigates the risk of AI hallucinations but also builds trust in AI-generated insights. Team members can verify each point, ensuring that their actions are based on accurate and reliable information. This structured, evidence-based approach transforms the shift handover into a seamless transition, empowering the incoming team to act swiftly and effectively against the cybersecurity threat.

By adopting this method, Torq has developed AI-based security automation solutions that reflect the analytical thought processes of SOC professionals. The structured summaries not only enhance clarity but also empower team members to validate AI findings, thereby building trust in AI and facilitating more effective collaboration between humans and AI systems.

Example of how a a structured, evidence-based AI-generated case summary can help with building trust in AI in your SOC operations
Figure 2: Structured Summary with Forensic Evidence-Based Citations

Strengthening Your SOC with Trustworthy AI

Innovation and trust go hand in hand, especially in the critical field of cybersecurity. The challenges we’ve discussed highlight the necessity for AI solutions that do more than automate — they need to enhance trust, collaboration, and efficiency within your team. 

This is where Torq’s AI capabilities become your trusted partner in navigating the complexities of security operations. By providing structured, evidence-backed summaries, AI Case Summaries ensure that every piece of information is transparent and verifiable. It empowers your SOC by enabling team members to work faster, make informed decisions with confidence, and seamlessly transition between shifts. By reducing uncertainty and mitigating the risks of AI errors, it streamlines operations and strengthens your entire security posture. 

Together, we’re fostering a collaborative environment where AI and human expertise unite to safeguard your organization more effectively than ever before.

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4 MSSP Trends: Differentiate Your Business with CTEM, AI SOC, and More

By Torq
October 1, 2024
7 Minute Read
Explore 4 key MSSP trends to help differentiate your business — from continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) to AI-powered SOCs.

Contents

MSSPs have huge potential for growth as more and more companies turn to experts to outsource their cybersecurity. Tailwinds such as escalating cyber threats, the need to protect more customer data than ever before, and growing compliance requirements are driving the managed security services market’s growth at a compound annual growth rate of 15.4% from 2023 to 2030. 

But competition is fierce in a market crowded with thousands of MSSPs — and the landscape is constantly evolving in response to seismic shifts like the rise of AI. 

How do you stand out from the MSSP crowd while adapting to major changes? Below we break down four key trends forward-thinking MSSPs are capitalizing on to differentiate their business and win.

MSSP Trend #1: Budgets are Shifting to More Proactive Security Solutions

In 2024, over 70% of businesses increased spending on proactive security solutions, outstripping spending in preventative and reactive measures.[1] It’s pretty easy to see why: a proactive approach helps organizations get ahead of threats before vulnerabilities can be exploited — rather than constantly dealing with the fallout from attacks that have already happened.  

Proactively identifying and remediating exposures can lower the overall security workload over time while decreasing the likelihood of downtime, data breaches, lost productivity, and lost revenue from attacks. To win business amidst this spending shift, MSSPs need to evolve their approach, services, and messaging towards a proactive stance.

Why this is great for MSSPs: Not only are clients increasingly looking for proactive security solutions, adopting a proactive posture also makes a better business case for MSSPs. 

It’s difficult to attach clear ROI to a reactive, defensive stance because lack of failure is hard to quantify. Flipping the script to an offense-oriented, proactive posture enables  more tangible measurement of harm mitigation and risk reduction. This helps MSSPs make a stronger business case to clients, and in turn, helps their clients demonstrate effective results to their own leadership when justifying budget allocation for security investments. 

MSSP Trend #2: CTEM Brings Opportunity to MSSPs Through Prioritized Threat Remediation

A proactive approach to security must be implemented programmatically in order to succeed. Gartner, Inc. introduced the concept of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) as a new methodology for security teams to reduce future exposure amidst a dynamically shifting threat landscape. 

Not every vulnerability is created equal — a key component of CTEM is to prioritize vulnerabilities based on urgency, exploitability, and potential impact on the business.

According to Gartner, Inc., by 2026, organizations that prioritize their security investments based on a continuous exposure management program will be 3x less likely to suffer a breach.

Why this helps MSSPs differentiate: A prioritized approach to threat remediation recommendations enables clients to focus their resources where they will have the most impact: critical vulnerabilities. This efficiently maximizes risk reduction — and helps MSSPs redefine their role as strategic partners, rather than just service providers.

Strategic recommendations also help MSSPs improve collaboration with clients’ internal teams when remediation actions are needed. Rather than lobbing an unmanageable barrage of issues that need fixing over the fence to a client’s overwhelmed IT teams, providing high-priority recommendations alongside justification for why the remediation matters to the business will enable client teams to more effectively address their most urgent vulnerabilities.

MSSP Trend #3: SOAR is Out — and Hyperautomation is Maximizing MSSP Margins

A proactive, programmatic security strategy requires a robust tech stack that streamlines processes and empowers human experts. For MSSPs, Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) was supposed to be the silver bullet to help them automate operations at scale. However, SOAR’s monolithic architecture and reliance on proprietary connectors failed to deliver even the most basic functionality required to effectively automate security operations — and it’s left MSSPs locked-in to a rigid vendor stack, unable to scale, and bleeding margins.

Enter Hyperautomation. Cloud-native, built for multi-tenancy, and with limitless security integrations and automations, the Torq Hyperautomation platform is changing the game for MSSPs. Hyperautomation:

  • Offloads repetitive tasks by instantly automating any security process using thousands of pre-built integration steps and AI-generated workflows.
  • Frees up MSSP teams to focus on high-value work by proactively identifying threats, prioritizing investigations, and only elevating cases to the appropriate analyst when human-in-the-loop intervention is needed.
  • Onboards new clients in minutes and reduces onboarding costs by securely sharing workflows across environments.
  • Seamlessly integrates with every tool in your clients’ existing security stack.

Why this matters to MSSPs: The supercharged efficiency gains from Hyperautomation means your MSSP can do more, faster — without increasing headcount. This translates to reduce customer acquisition costs, boosted margins, faster-time-to-value, and improved SLAs. Sounds like a win-win-win-win.

The latest MSSP trend? Ditching SOAR for Hyperautomation. Get the Managed Services Manifesto to learn why SOAR is dead.

MSSP Trend #4: AI-Powered SOCs are Rapidly Becoming the Future of Security Operations

MSSP SOCs are under siege from a tsunami of threats growing in severity and complexity, exacerbated by an ongoing talent shortage. Security analysts can only address half of the alerts they’re assigned each day, and nearly half say average detection and response time has increased within the past two years,[2] impacting MSSPs’ ability to meet SLAs. This can lead to penalties, customer churn, and reputational damage. 

AI has radically changed the security world — and it’s key to helping MSSP SOCs beat burnout and stay ahead of evolving threats. Leveraging AI in security operations is not about replacing analyst jobs, but rather augmenting and upleveling existing staff so they can make informed decisions faster without being bogged down by low-level alerts. 

With Torq, MSSPs harness the power of AI through:

  • Socrates, the AI SOC Analyst: Socrates can autonomously execute SOC-defined runbooks written in natural language, auto-remediating 95% of cases within minutes. For critical cases, your human analysts can collaborate with Socrates using natural language to summarize case details, request additional information, and trigger complex remediation workflows — upleveling the capabilities of your team and speeding up response times across the board.
  • AI Workflow Builder: Create custom security automation in seconds by describing your needs in simple, natural language, then previewing and customizing the results — no code required. 
  • AI Case Summaries: Rather than manually slogging through pages of logs and incident details, Torq automatically presents your team with a concise, insightful summary of each case, surfacing critical insights and recommendations so your team can make the right decisions quickly.

Why this helps MSSPs: By automating workflows, speeding up processes, enriching and summarizing cases, and augmenting human expertise, Torq helps MSSP SOC teams achieve machine speed response and start building an autonomous SOC. This results in a faster MTTR to better serve customers — improving their satisfaction and retention. 

Not only that, an AI-powered SOC helps eliminate alert fatigue and analyst burnout so your team has the bandwidth to focus on the bigger picture: strategically securing your clients’ organizations. 

“We are impressed by how [Torq’s] AI augmentation capabilities empower [SOC] staff members to be much more proactive about fortifying the security perimeter.”

IDC HyperSOC™ Spotlight Report

Unlock Growth and Differentiation: The Power of Proactive, AI-Enhanced Security

Proactiveness, prioritization, Hyperautomation, and AI are the future of security operations — and the keys to MSSP evolution and success. Adopting these now will help you stand out, better serve customers, hold on to your best talent, and boost your margins. 

Explore how Torq is helping MSSPs get ahead of the curve and win.

Sources:

  1. Security Magazine, More than 70% of companies increased spending on proactive security, June 2024
  2. Morning Consult and IBM, Global Security Operations Center Study Results, March 2023

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Accelerating Torq’s Vision: Announcing Our Series C Funding Round

By Ofer Smadari, CEO
September 24, 2024
4 Minute Read
The latest Torq funding round closed with $70M in Series C funding — fueling our mission of revolutionizing SecOps through the Generative AI-based Torq Hyperautomation Platform and Torq HyperSOC solution.

I’m excited to share some significant news that marks a pivotal milestone in Torq’s journey. We’ve successfully closed our Series C funding round, securing a $70M investment to propel our mission of revolutionizing SecOps through the Generative AI-based Torq Hyperautomation Platform and cutting-edge Torq HyperSOC solution.

A Journey Fueled by Innovation

When we launched Torq three years ago, our vision was clear: To transform SOC automation and operation teams with solutions that not only defend against sophisticated threats, but also streamline and hyperautomate SecOps at the largest global enterprises. During the past three years, our dedicated team has worked tirelessly to build the Torq Hyperautomation Platform which seamlessly integrates with any existing infrastructure and security tool, providing the unparalleled ability to instantly and precisely remediate security events, and orchestrate complex security processes at scale. 

This funding round is more than just a financial boost. It reflects the confidence of our investors and the strength of our technology. We’re thrilled to continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in cybersecurity, particularly with a focus on Hyperautomation.

Doubling Down on Generative AI

A key highlight of this funding round is our commitment to double down on Generative AI. We recognize that Generative AI has transformative potential in enhancing cybersecurity. By integrating these advanced technologies into our platform, we aim to provide even more sophisticated threat detection, response automation, and predictive capabilities.

Generative AI will empower our systems to analyze vast amounts of data and generate actionable insights in real-time. This will not only improve the accuracy and efficiency of SecOps, but also enable our customers to stay ahead of adversaries with cutting-edge defensive measures.

What Series C Means for Us and Our Customers

Series C will accelerate our growth in several key areas:

  1. Innovation and R&D: We’ll invest heavily in R&D to enhance our platform’s capabilities, ensuring we stay ahead of emerging threats and provide our customers with state-of-the-art solutions.
  2. Expansion of Our Talent Pool: To drive our vision forward, we need the best minds in the industry. This funding will allow us to expand our team and bring in experts who are as passionate about cybersecurity and Hyperautomation as we are.
  3. Market Penetration and Customer Growth: With this capital, we’ll accelerate our go-to-market strategy and scale our operations to reach more businesses and organizations globally. Our commitment to innovation has already attracted a rapidly growing customer base, and we are excited to extend our reach even further. New and existing customers will benefit from enhanced features, faster deployment, and robust security measures designed to meet their evolving needs.
  4. Customer Success and Support: We’re dedicated to providing exceptional products and ensuring our customers have the support they need to maximize their investment in our technology. This funding will help us enhance our customer success programs and provide top-tier support to our growing client base.

Value for Our Growing Customer Base

Our expanding customer base is clear validation of our approach and the value we deliver. For our existing customers, this funding means we can continue to enhance and refine our platform, offering sophisticated tools and capabilities to keep their operations secure. For new customers, it represents an opportunity to leverage our state-of-the-art technology from a company committed to pushing the boundaries of cybersecurity and automation.

A Thank You to Our Partners and Team

This achievement would not have been possible without the unwavering support of our investors, partners, and incredible employees. Your collective belief in our vision and dedication to our mission have been instrumental in getting us to where we are today.

Looking Ahead

As we move forward, our commitment to innovation and excellence remains steadfast. We’re excited about the possibilities ahead and are more determined than ever to lead the way in cybersecurity and Hyperautomation. Together, we will continue to build a safer, more resilient digital world.

Thank you for your continued support and trust in us. Here’s to the next chapter of our journey!

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The Evolution of Automation and AI for Security Operations

By Bob Boyle
September 23, 2024
6 Minute Read

Contents

In an era where cyber threats are constantly evolving and security teams are overwhelmed by an ever-expanding flood of alerts, tech sprawl, and an ongoing talent shortage, the modernization of the SOC is no longer optional — it’s imperative. 

According to Gartner, automation and artificial intelligence are the keys to unlocking new levels of efficiency, accuracy, and resilience in the fight against cyber threats. Learn how SecOps automation has evolved way (way) past SOAR and how SOC teams are putting AI into action to elevate their teams and achieve machine-speed response times.

The Security Operations Automation Journey

  1. Legacy SOAR came – and went. The security operations automation journey started with Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) as the primary automation and orchestration option for SecOps teams. However, as the cybersecurity landscape grew more complex and the volume of threats increased, SOAR’s limitations became glaringly evident. Gartner even went as far as to say “SOAR is Obsolete” in their latest ITSM Hype Cycle (2024), placing SOAR at the bottom of their “Trough of Disillusionment”. 
  1. Hyperautomation unleashed limitless potential. Unlike SOAR, Hyperautomation offered unlimited security integrations, simple automations, and cloud-native scalability. The incorporation of Case Management into a Hyperautomation engine helped mitigate alert fatigue by enabling automated remediation of false positives and other low-risk threats, while more intelligently prioritizing comprehensive security cases in a meaningful way. 
  1. AI sped up the SOC. The next evolution of security automation involved leveraging Artificial Intelligence to augment human expertise, enabling analysts to achieve machine-speed detection and response.

The modern SOC has arrived. As Gartner highlighted, to overcome the existential challenges that continue to plague SOC teams, security operations must continue to adapt. This brings us to the future of SecOps, where the gold standard for the modern SOC is a purpose-built combination of Hyperautomation and AI to achieve the autonomous SOC.

Benefits of Adopting Automation and AI for Security Operations 

Adopting automation and AI for security operations is not about eliminating the need for SOC analysts — it’s about alleviating the pressure on SOC teams, helping to avoid burnout and reduce the 4 million+ talent shortage gap that exists in the cybersecurity industry today. 

“By 2028, AI in threat detection and IR will rise from 5% to 70%, to primarily augment, not replace staff.” 

Source: Gartner

As Gartner highlights, while the growth of AI continues to expand, its primary aim should be to augment the existing staff operating the SOC, not replace them entirely. This is good to keep in mind, as many organizations are hesitant to fully entrust AI with their security operations. However, with the rise of AI used in targeted attack campaigns, most organizations do recognize that it is near impossible for humans alone to keep pace with today’s quantity and complexity of threats.

When implementing AI for security operations, the most successful benchmarks to strive for are: 

  • Eliminating alert fatigue
  • Improving SOC analyst morale
  • Getting time back to focus on critical threats
  • Mitigating threats more quickly and efficiently
  • Increasing the accuracy of results

The benefits of automation and AI for security operations are not in removing human decision making altogether, but rather to uplevel the skills of the most junior SOC analysts, while preventing the most experienced analysts from burning out of their role. And that is exactly what Torq Socrates was built for. 

The AI SOC Analyst

Torq Socrates is an AI SOC Analyst for autonomous contextual alert triage, incident investigation, and response. Socrates elevates the performance of tier-1 analysts and augments end-to-end investigations of alerts. Socrates is only able to leverage the tools and access given to it through building automated workflows, so SOC teams always remain in control of what is possible with AI while significantly improving their operational efficiency.

There are 2 ways SOC teams use Socrates: 

  1. Assigning cases for auto-remediation
  2. Remediating cases faster with AI augmentation 

First, SOC teams can assign specific cases to Socrates for auto-remediation without requiring any human intervention. 

In traditional analyst remediation, when a case is assigned, the analyst typically consults a runbook to guide them through the response required to contain the specific event (or events) that appear within the case. From start to finish — the triage, investigation, and remediation of a single case can take a human analyst 30 minutes or more, depending on the experience level of the analyst.

Socrates follows the same process, but at machine speed. Socrates analyzes SOC-defined runbooks written in natural language and follows explicit instructions, resulting in complete auto-remediation of 95% of cases in mere minutes. 

For cases that increase in severity based on Socrates’ investigation, or as new case data is added raising the threat to a critical level, SOC teams can build off-ramps into each runbook that tell Socrates when to escalate cases to a human analyst for intervention.

Which brings us to the second use case, leveraging Socrates to remediate cases that do require human decision making — faster. Analysts who are assigned critical cases for human-in-the-loop remediation can use natural language to chat with Socrates, asking it to: 

  • Summarize case observables, attachments, historical findings, associated indicators of compromise (IOCs), or current case status.
  • Enrich cases by requesting further triage, investigation, and additional threat intelligence.
  • Trigger complex remediation workflows through Torq’s Hyperautomation platform.  

With Socrates, even a brand new analyst who hasn’t been trained on how to leverage the full functionality of every security solution in their stack can easily ask Socrates to quarantine devices, isolate hosts, or kick off a password reset — without the risk of human error. Socrates’ capabilities are as limitless as the Hyperautomation engine it’s built on, but bounded by the automation workflows that SOC teams opt to build into Socrates’ toolbox. 

In its simplest form, Socrates was built to do what Torq has set out to do from the very beginning: Hyperautomate SecOps. Socrates automates repetitive tasks and reduces Tier-1 triage and investigation by 90% — helping humans respond to threats faster.

Embracing Hyperautomation and AI for Security Operations 

In an era where cyber threats are constantly evolving, the modernization of the SOC is no longer optional — it’s imperative. The inclusion of AI for security operations — like Torq Socrates — marks a pivotal shift in how SOC teams can combat alert fatigue, tech sprawl, and talent shortage. 

By integrating Hyperautomation and AI, organizations regain significant amounts of time, allowing SOC analysts to focus on more strategic tasks while maintaining control over critical security operations. The future of security operations lies in this harmonious blend of human expertise and intelligent automation, setting a new standard for operational efficiency in security operations.

Ready to embrace Hyperautomation and AI for security operations? Get a demo today.

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AI Product

Build Security Workflows in Seconds with AI Workflow Builder

By Brian Higgins
September 19, 2024
3 Minute Read

In today’s fast-moving threat landscape, Hyperautomation is essential. But building workflows from scratch? That’s time you don’t have. That’s why we started with a library of pre-built templates, helping teams quickly configure security automation workflows. Templates made automation more accessible. Now, we’re taking the next step in that evolution and introducing Torq’s AI Workflow Builder.

By harnessing the power of AI, we’re going beyond templates. Now, in addition to the library of pre-built workflows, you can simply describe what you need, and Torq will generate a workflow tailored for you in seconds. No code, no limits — just fast, flexible automation that meets your unique security requirements.

Evolving from Templates to AI-Powered Workflows

The days of spending hours manually building workflow from scratch are over. Security teams need agility, but building automation workflows step-by-step slows you down. Templates provide a fast way to get started by selecting from pre-configured workflows. However, we recognize that templates have limitations and can sometimes call for resources the team doesn’t have. They require adaptation and configuration and sometimes fail to fully capture the specific needs of each security team.

You already know the events and actions for your team —  let AI Workflow Builder take care of the rest. AI Workflow Builder is a natural language agent that leverages Torq’s 4,000+ out-of-the-box actions and 300+ integrations and enables you to implement faster than ever before. Allowing you to focus on the bigger picture: securing your organization.

With AI Workflow Builder, simply:

  1. Describe your workflow: Provide bullet points describing your desired actions.
  2. Get instant results: Torq’s AI instantly generates a workflow preview tailored to your needs.
  3. Customize with ease: You remain in full control, with the flexibility to adjust, fine-tune, and add configurations as needed.


As Gartner highlighted in their 2024 Hype Cycle, the industry has evolved beyond traditional SOAR platforms. As the autonomous SOC emerges, Torq is setting a new standard with Hyperautomation — one that prioritizes speed, efficiency, and security.

AI Builder In Action: Instant IP Threat Detection

As an example, you might need to check an IP address or a range of IP addresses using VirusTotal and take action if they’re flagged. Simply prompt the AI Workflow Builder with natural language to describe what you need:

“Check IP address 8.8.8.8 with VirusTotal, and if it’s flagged as malicious more than 3 times then do the following:

  1. Create a Torq case with High severity 
  2. Send a notification to #alerts in Slack.”

Seconds later, Torq’s AI Workflow Builder generates a fully functioning workflow ready for review. You can tweak anything — from setting custom thresholds to fine-tuning case details and personalizing Slack alerts. AI handles the grunt work, but you stay in control.

Get Started with AI Workflow Builder

Whether you’re a beginner or an automation expert, Torq’s AI Workflow Builder simplifies creating powerful, secure workflows. With 4,000+ out-of-the-box actions, 300+ integrations, and 325+ million workflows executed annually, Torq has the speed, flexibility, and scale to meet modern security needs.

Schedule a demo today and discover how powerful and easy Hyperautomation can be with Torq.

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Hyperautomation

Security Automation Explained — and Why It’s Essential for Modern SOCs

By Torq
September 17, 2024
9 Minute Read

Contents

Security teams are drowning — managing 10,000+ daily alerts, stretched thin by an ongoing cybersecurity talent shortage, and struggling to keep up with evolving threats. The solution? Security automation, particularly AI-driven security Hyperautomation.

What is Security Automation?

Security automation leverages automated workflows to handle critical cybersecurity tasks at machine speed— eliminating time-consuming manual processes like threat detection, analysis, and response. By automating these repetitive tasks, organizations can increase efficiency and accuracy and ensure a consistent security posture against threats.

The gold standard of security automation is AI-driven Hyperautomation, enabling security teams to move beyond simple automation and build an autonomous SOC for even greater efficiency and security gains.

Cybersecurity is essential to every organization — but without automation, it’s slow, resource-intensive, and prone to human error. Manual workflows bog down security teams, stretching time and resources thin while leaving gaps in threat detection, assessment, and remediation. Automating security not only accelerates response times but also ensures accuracy, eliminating costly mistakes and inefficiencies.

Cybersecurity automation uses technology to identify, understand, and respond to threats within your organization’s environments and to execute repetitive and time-consuming tasks. In other words, when you automate security, much of the grunt work can be handled by software, with limited, if any, manual intervention. This is especially useful when dealing with a high volume of alerts, allowing the software to filter out the low-priority and false positives threats and prioritize the critical ones, escalating to human analysts only when necessary. 

Why is Security Automation Necessary? 

Large organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to global multinationals, face existential security challenges that demand security automation solutions, including:

  • Expanding attack surface: Security teams face alerts on alerts on alerts, from phishing and endpoint vulnerabilities to insider threats and fraud. Without automation to filter, prioritize, and respond to these threats at machine speed, teams simply can’t keep up.
  • Global cybersecurity talent shortage: According to ISC2, the estimated cybersecurity workforce gap is 4.76 million. SOC teams are stretched thin, and this problem is only getting worse. As tech stacks expand across multi-cloud environments, security teams’ capability to manage them is maxed out. Cloud security automation isn’t replacing analysts — it’s making their jobs possible.
  • Siloed security architecture: SecOps teams manage 70+ security tools across environments. Without integrations to combine these workflows, security teams face misaligned processes, inefficient work, and manual effort that slow down response times.

“60% of line of business users agree an inability to connect systems, apps and data hinders automation.” – ZDNET

How Security Automation Benefits Teams

  • Enhanced Efficiency: Cybersecurity automation eliminates repetitive tasks like data analysis and incident investigation. By streamlining workflows, security teams can dramatically reduce time-consuming processes, improve mean-time-to-respond (MTTR), and alleviate operational fatigue — boosting productivity, agility, and overall security resilience.
  • More Accurate Response: Manual processes run the risk of human error. Security automation minimizes this risk by implementing consistent detection and quicker responses. It also shortens the time-to-action for remediation, preventing further risks to the business.
  • Reduced Analyst Burnout: By automating time-consuming manual processes, security automation lightens workloads and prevents the constant alert fatigue that drains security teams. Automation frees up time for analysts to develop their expertise instead of getting bogged down in repetitive, busy work.
  • Scalability: Automation in security centralizes tooling, enriches security cases with contextual intelligence, and provides real-time updates across platforms for seamless teamwork.
  • Reduced costs: Automation can help optimize resources and operational expenses by eliminating manual tasks, streamlining workflows, reducing the need for specialized staff, and improving resource allocation. It can also help avoid data loss, reputational damage, and other financial losses from security incidents.
  • Stronger compliance: Leveraging security automation tools to manage reporting and compliance activities decreases regulatory risk.

Security Automation vs. Security Orchestration and SOAR

Many assume security automation and orchestration are synonymous, but there are many important differences between the two. 

Security orchestration was intended to create a more streamlined workflow when connecting multiple tools and processes for security teams to act with greater efficiency and confidence. With SOAR, we all know this didn’t happen. 

SOAR platforms are slow, rigid, and don’t actually speed up processes for SOC teams. With limited integrations, outdated technology, and running on a single server, legacy SOAR hinders security teams’ ability to detect and respond to threats across environments — in fact, Gartner called SOAR an ‘obsolete’ technology that is being replaced by security workflow automation.

Security workflow automation brings together different teams, processes, and technologies to drive more efficient and scalable operations across a much broader scope. It does this through no-code, low-code, and even AI-generated workflow building, meaning that these tools can be used by just about anyone, not just security engineers, to define risks, enforce security rules, and remediate threats.

SOAR was built to automate security processes, but it’s slow, complex, and requires extensive coding. Security Hyperautomation is the next evolution, eliminating inefficiencies with AI and no-code workflow automation. Here’s how they compare:

Security Hyperautomation vs SOAR

Security HyperautomationSOAR
Architecture✔ Cloud-native architecture, elastic scalingX Monolithic architecture, limited scaling
Integrations✔ Limitless, extensible, continuous API updatesX Limited, inflexible, requires custom dev
Efficiency✔ Helps manage risks at scale without adding headcount or requiring specialized resourcesX Requires extensive resources and constant maintenance
Accessibility✔ Allows all stakeholders to define and enforce security requirements X Requires cybersecurity expertise to configure and operate
Automated Response✔ No-code automation frameworks can automate threat response based on rulesX Focuses more on orchestrating responses by security professionals than remediating 
AI Capabilities✔ Built-in AI agents for autonomous remediation, workflow building, data transformation, and moreX Limited or non-existent
Analyst Productivity✔ High, 10x+ operational boostX Low, prone to burnout
Overall Effectiveness✔ Future-proof solution, providing comprehensive security coverage and automationX Limited flexibility, struggles to meet modern SecOps demands

Ready to pull the plug on your SOAR? Get the migration guide >

How to Pick the Right Security Automation Tool

Choosing the right security automation solution isn’t just about checking a box — it’s about finding a platform that seamlessly integrates with your existing security stack, scales with your needs, and actually delivers on the promise of efficiency and protection. Here’s what to consider:

1. Integration and Compatibility

An enterprise security automation platform is only as good as its ability to integrate with your existing tools. Look for a solution that offers out-of-the-box integrations with all of your key security and IT infrastructure, as well as the flexibility to build custom integrations without requiring extensive coding. The best platforms eliminate manual bottlenecks by enabling security teams to connect their entire stack effortlessly — without waiting on vendor updates or custom development work.

2. True No-Code vs. Customization Capabilities

Some solutions claim to be “no-code” but still require extensive scripting to handle real-world security scenarios. Choose a platform that provides both no-code simplicity and AI-generated workflow building. You shouldn’t have to choose between ease of use and flexibility. A well-designed security automation tool allows security professionals of all skill levels to build workflows while still enabling advanced users to fine-tune automations for complex use cases.

3. AI-Driven Decision Making

Cybersecurity automation has evolved beyond simple if-this-then-that workflows. Modern solutions, like agentic AI-powered automation, don’t just execute pre-defined rules — they can analyze threats in real time, correlate signals across multiple tools, and autonomously remediate low-risk incidents. When evaluating platforms, look for AI-driven insights and contextual automation that help security teams make smarter, faster decisions.

4. Speed and Scalability

At this stage, you should evaluate potential security automation solutions with a Proof of Concept (POC), focusing on ROI and time-to-value. Choose the use cases that are mission-critical to your organization to assess how quickly and easily they can be operational. Additionally, ensure the platform can scale with your needs — handling increasing volumes of security events without performance degradation or the need for constant tuning.

5. Vendor Vision

Security threats evolve daily, and your security automation solution should grow with them. Choose a vendor with a clear vision for innovation — one that’s actively incorporating AI, Hyperautomation, and advanced case management capabilities. The best platforms don’t just keep up with security trends — they redefine them.

Case Study: Major Regional Bank Accelerates Phishing and Ransomware with Security Automation

A leading regional financial services organization turned to Torq for security automation to eliminate slow, inconsistent security responses and automate critical processes across its SOC. Facing a growing volume of phishing, ransomware, and fraud threats — along with a shortage of security analysts — the bank needed a solution that could streamline alert triage, investigation, and remediation in real time. 

Bypassing legacy SOAR solutions, this top 30 bank found the Torq Hyperautomation platform to be the best fit. By deploying Torq’s low-code/no-code security automation, the bank built and launched 100+ workflows in just three months, reducing mean time to investigate (MTTI) from hours to minutes. Torq’s limitless API integrations easily integrated with the bank’s existing security stack, allowing for a unified, automated approach to phishing and ransomware mitigation. 

The Future of Security Automation: Torq Hyperautomation and the Autonomous SOC

Security automation is an important step in modernizing cybersecurity, eliminating manual processes, and accelerating threat response. But the story doesn’t end there. 

The evolution of security automation and AI for security operations.
Explore the evolution of security automation and AI for security operations >

Security Hyperautomation enables SecOps to operate on a new scale thanks to AI-driven decision-making, adaptive workflows, and full-stack interoperability. This shift is powering a natural evolution toward the autonomous SOC, where AI doesn’t just automate security processes but also intelligently manages and optimizes them in real time.

Unlike traditional security automation, which focuses on predefined rule-based responses, Torq Hyperautomation dynamically connects disparate tools, enriches alerts with real-time intelligence, and autonomously executes remediation — all without manual intervention. It integrates AI and large language models (LLMs) to instantly correlate signals across multiple sources, filter false positives, and prioritize critical threats.

Where security automation removes friction, Hyperautomation eliminates inefficiencies entirely — allowing organizations to move from reactive to proactive, self-sustaining security operations. Agentic AI-powered automation can investigate, escalate, and remediate threats autonomously, closing security gaps faster than ever. AI-powered Hyperautomation doesn’t just improve security workflows — it redefines how modern SOC teams operate.

Want to see how AI-powered security Hyperautomation can transform your SOC?

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Product

What’s New With Torq: September 2024

By Torq
September 6, 2024
4 Minute Read

Contents

The Team at Torq is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in security automation, and we’re excited to share several new capabilities designed to make security analysts’ lives easier and more efficient:

Introducing AI Case Summaries

Torq AI Case Summaries leverages the power of artificial intelligence to streamline and accelerate your security operations. Imagine this: instead of manually reviewing pages of logs and incident details, your team is presented with a concise, insightful summary of each case automatically generated by Torq.

Here’s how it works:

  • AI-Powered Summarization: Torq AI Case Summary analyzes all the relevant data points associated with a security alert, including logs, threat intelligence feeds, and historical incident data.
  • Instant Insights: Our advanced AI algorithms identify the most critical information and present it in a clear, easy-to-understand summary, highlighting the potential impact and recommended actions.
  • Faster Response Times: Armed with these AI-driven insights, your team can quickly understand the nature of the threat, prioritize incidents effectively, and take decisive action to mitigate risks.

Torq AI Case Summary enables your security team to operate at peak performance. By automating the tedious task of case summarization, AI Case Summary frees up analysts to focus on what matters most: investigating complex threats, hunting for vulnerabilities, and proactively strengthening your security posture.

Learn More

Simplify Form Building with Torq Interact

Need a department head to approve a suspicious travel request? Or perhaps you need a marketing manager to verify the legitimacy of a social media file? Torq Interact empowers security teams to automate approvals and data collection tasks with teams outside the security organization, ensuring a swift and coordinated response to security events.

As customers use Torq Interact to streamline both security team processes and end-user engagement, we continue to find new ways to improve the Interact experience. As of today, four new fields have been added to Torq Interact: 

  1. Date & Time Parameter: End users can easily select specific dates and times within interactions. For example, they can pinpoint the exact date of a thwarted phishing attempt.
  2. Enhanced File Parameter: Users can now upload multiple files simultaneously rather than one at a time. This simplifies the user experience, especially when dealing with unpredictable files. 
  3. Download File Parameter: Now, Torq users can leverage Interact to send files directly to end users for download, either directly or through workflow context. Analysts might be looking for a secure way to send a potentially malicious file to another team member so they can execute it in a sandbox for further investigation. 
  4. Secondary Button: This enables Interact users to add flexibility to their workflows with a secondary button that allows users to submit forms without filling in all required fields, perfect for adapting to various interaction scenarios.
  5. Conditional Elements: The conditional element introduces an advanced logic conditional element to enhance the end-user experience by dynamically presenting questions or information based on live responses, increasing the accuracy of every interaction.

Learn More

Enhanced Data Records with Torq Tables

Security teams are drowning in data. Every tool in your stack generates logs, alerts, and reports. But making sense of it all? That’s where things get messy. Spreadsheets buckle under the weight of hundreds, thousands, millions of rows. Custom dashboards require coding expertise and constant maintenance. You need a way to wrangle your data, not be ruled by it.

Torq Tables is a powerful, flexible way to interact with all your security data, directly within the Torq platform.

Torq Tables Enable You To:

  • Centralize your data: Pull in data from any source – NIST, SIEM, EDR, cloud platforms, and more – into a single, unified view—no jumping between tools and screens.
  • Investigate with speed and precision: Filter, sort, and analyze a significant amount of data in real-time. Uncover hidden threats and patterns that would otherwise remain buried.
  • Automate with ease: Trigger workflows directly from data in tables, responding to threats and anomalies at machine speed.

Torq Tables is now available for all Torq users. Log in to your Torq instance to get started, or schedule a demo.

Learn More

Monitor and Manage Workspaces with Organization Management

Organization Management introduces a new single pane of glass view, simplifying the process for Torq users to monitor usage across multiple workspaces and perform org-level administrative tasks. Additionally, we’ve introduced a new Organization Manager role to grant appropriate stakeholders org-level access while adhering to a least-privilege access approach. 

Learn More

We’re excited to see what security teams will accomplish with these new capabilities. Keep an eye out for future updates as we push the boundaries of security automation!

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Hyperautomation Insights

A Blueprint for Hyperautomating Your Next-Gen Secure Software Development Lifecycle

By Aner Izraeli
August 26, 2024
5 Minute Read

Aner Izraeli is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Torq. He leads Torq’s cybersecurity strategy with a focus on innovation and resilience. Aner’s career spans over two decades in the cybersecurity field, where he has consistently demonstrated expertise in SIEM/SOC, incident response, and network security. 

At Torq, we’re all about pushing boundaries and driving innovation. But we can’t afford to treat security as an afterthought in our relentless pursuit of speed and creativity. As a lean and agile team, we’re constantly challenged to stay ahead of emerging threats without slowing down our momentum. In this blog, I’ll take you behind the curtain to reveal how we’ve engineered an automated application security pipeline that helps us maintain security and fuels our rapid innovation.

The Challenge

At Torq, our software engineering teams manage various components and microservices, each with unique functionalities requiring meticulous threat modeling and vulnerability assessments. Modern software engineering integrates open-source and proprietary libraries, which introduces potential security vulnerabilities in individual and shared components across teams. The primary challenge is ensuring these vulnerabilities are continuously identified and mitigated before they compromise the production environment. Simultaneously, it’s crucial to maintain an environment where teams can continue to innovate and deliver high-quality software without being hindered by security concerns. In short, how do we ensure that potential application security vulnerabilities are identified and resolved before they can threaten our production environment, all while empowering our teams to innovate and deliver high-quality software?

The Solution Architecture

Our solution started with integrating an Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform, providing complete control over our supply chain and Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This visibility extends across open-source packages, Dockerfile dependencies, and container images—everything from the far-right side of the SDLC. But visibility alone can be overwhelming. We needed to take it further by leveraging Torq’s Hyperautomation capabilities. 

This diagram provides a high-level illustration of the components that participate in the Application Security events pipeline.

Program Vision

My vision was simple, but ambitious: create a seamless, automated pipeline that transforms how we manage vulnerabilities. Here’s how we did it:

  • Torq Workflows: Aggregate vulnerabilities by category (open-source, SBOM, secrets) and severity, streamlining issue management.
  • Centralized Case Management: A single, aggregated Torq case for each repo, simplifying investigation and eliminating redundant tickets.
  • Automation at Scale: With one click, generate Jira tickets, pull requests, and Slack notifications, all customized to our R&D teams’ templates.
  • Daily SLA Reminders: Automated workflows ensure SLAs are met, keeping teams on track and focused.

I used Torq’s workflows to categorize and aggregate issues, while centralized case management simplifies investigations for R&D teams. Automation facilitates generating Jira tickets, pull requests, and Slack notifications, keeping teams aligned with daily SLA reminders. Ultimately ensuring our teams can focus on what matters most—innovation without compromise. Below is an illustration of what that automated flow looks like:

The Implementation In Action

A single Torq case aggregates issues based on the severity and category within a specific repository, streamlining the work for R&D teams. 

When a new issue is automatically pushed from the ASPM to Torq, it presents a comprehensive table with the relevant package, recommended upgrades, a verdict, and direct links to GitHub and ASPM findings. If the issue requires R&D attention, Torq’s quick action button can initiate a new workflow, generating a Jira ticket, a branch-based Pull Request, and notify the relevant R&D team via Slack, all while ensuring SLA compliance.

Now, with the necessary information at their fingertips, R&D teams can quickly identify and address what needs to be patched. They’re provided a direct link to the Pull Request, ensuring a seamless transition to the next steps. From here, Torq’s change management and SDLC policies take over, with the changes being reviewed, approved, and merged just like any other code, new Torq feature, or artifact.

SLA Compliance

In line with Torq’s policy, every issue is assigned a Service Level Agreement (SLA) based on severity. To ensure timely resolution, a daily automated workflow reviews open cases and notifies each R&D team of their remaining time to address these issues. This approach keeps teams on track, ensuring vulnerabilities are managed effectively without disrupting ongoing development.

When To Implement Successful Hyperautomation in SSDLC

Achieving fully automated vulnerability management may sound like an ambitious goal, but it’s essential for the velocity of modern security operations. Within Torq, we strive for a seamless process from detection to merge. Successful automation of these processes became possible:

  1. When the vulnerability management program is mature and well-established.
  2. When there are consistent, repeatable actions required for product or software updates.
  3. When the SDLC includes a robust testing process, acting as a safety net to catch any oversights during automation.

Conclusion: The Business Impact

The result of our efforts: A fully automated vulnerability management process that has revolutionized our approach to AppSec. We’ve slashed remediation time, improved SLA adherence, and empowered our R&D teams to deliver secure, high-quality software faster than ever. Here was the quantitative impact:

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Insights

No-Code Security Automation vs. SOAR Tools

By Torq
August 13, 2024
4 Minute Read
Learn how no-code security automation software stacks up to SOAR tools and AI-driven Hyperautomation.

SOC teams have been on the hunt for ages for a way to automate manual, repetitive tasks and workflows. SOAR was intended to streamline security workflows — however, legacy SOAR tools have long since been called “obsolete” by Gartner due to their reliance on excessive customization and scripting. 

That’s why legacy SOAR is being abandoned by SecOps teams in favor of no-code security automation solutions, particularly the new gold standard for today’s modern SOC operations — AI-driven Hyperautomation and the autonomous SOC. 

Let’s break down how these security automation software solutions compare.

What are SOAR Tools?

Legacy Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) tools were designed to help security teams centralize and automate security operations through playbooks. SOARs were developed to solve many of the problems associated with security incident and event management (SIEM) platforms, the old standby tool for security engineers.

However, SOAR tools suffer from limitations such as rigid architecture and a heavy reliance on custom scripting and coding, hindering their ability to integrate with the modern security stack and adapt to evolving security needs.

Learn why SOAR is dead >

What is No-Code Security Automation?

No-code security automation refers to tools that anyone — not just security engineers with coding expertise — can use to build and deploy automated security workflows that define risks, enforce security rules, and remediate threats automatically. 

By using a codeless approach to security (think drag-and-drop visual interfaces and pre-built templates), no-code security automation tools enable security teams to manage risks without depending on specialized, expensive scripting skillsets.

SOAR Tools vs. No-Code Security Automation

SOAR tools and no-code security automation platforms overlap in many of their objectives, including:

  • Automation: Both solutions enable automated risk identification and management.
  • Efficiency: SOAR and no-code security tools are designed to help organizations manage risks more effectively.
  • Going beyond threat detection: Unlike SIEMs, SOARs and no-code security frameworks don’t just detect risks and send alerts, they can also be used to manage risk response.
  • Threat intelligence: Both categories of tools draw on threat intelligence data to help identify and assess the newest types of security risks.

But the similarities stop there. In general, no-code security automation delivers additional features and benefits that SOAR tools lack, including:

  • Accessibility: No-code security automation frameworks are easy enough for anyone to use, regardless of coding experience. In this way, they allow all stakeholders, not just cybersecurity experts, to define and enforce security requirements within the systems they manage.
  • Automated response: In addition to making it easy to configure security rules, no-code security automation frameworks can automate threat response based on those rules. Traditional SOARs provide some automated response features, but they focus more on orchestrating threat response actions by cybersecurity professionals than on actually remediating the threat themselves.
  • Configuration security posture management: Traditional SOAR tools usually focus on identifying active risks within environments, not assessing configurations to find flaws that could enable a breach. No-code security automation tools do both, however, which means they can address domains like cloud security posture management (CSPM) in addition to runtime security.
  • Simple integrations: While it’s possible to deploy a SOAR in various environments and with many types of systems, doing so usually requires extensive configuration and customizations. In contrast, no-code security automation platforms are designed to start working out of the box, across any mainstream environment, with minimal configuration tweaks.

Enter: AI-Powered Hyperautomation  

Building upon the accessibility and flexibility of no-code automation, the modern SOC now demands a more intelligent and scalable approach: AI-driven Hyperautomation. Torq’s autonomous SecOps platform powered by AI-driven Hyperautomation represents a fundamental leap in the evolution of security automation for modern SOC capabilities.

Security Hyperautomation delivers significant advancements over SOAR and basic no-code automation. In addition to limitless integrations and cloud-based scalability, Torq Hyperautomation™ offers powerful case management capabilities that eliminate alert fatigue by automating Tier-1 threat remediation and intelligently prioritizing complex cases. And now, Torq’s agentic AI and Multi-Agent System is revolutionizing SOC efficiency through autonomous triage, investigation, and response. 

Thanks to no-code, low-code, and AI-generated workflow building, Torq empowers your SOC team to build and manage automations without extensive coding knowledge — while also offering full-code capabilities for those on your team who want granular control.

By automating complex workflows in minutes and leveraging intelligent decision-making, the AI-powered SOC can help organizations move beyond reactive security to become more efficient and resilient in the face of talent shortages and ever-evolving threats.

See how Torq Hyperautomation stacks up:

Torq Hyperautomation vs. Legacy SOAR Tools

Torq Hyperautomation vs. No-Code Security Automation Software

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