Sophie Bovy
Rethinking investigative workflows to deliver clarity, confidence, and conclusive answers.
If you’ve been watching the cybersecurity technology market lately, you’ve seen the rise of “AI SOC” platforms promising lightning-fast triage and automated response. They move quickly, sure, but are they really changing the game?
The truth? Speed without depth just hides problems faster and could be more costly in the long run.
When Fast Isn’t Good Enough
Picture this: your team contains an incident in record time. The alert is closed, the dashboard is green. But a few days later, the same adversary reappears. Why? Because no one had the evidence to explain how they got in, how far they spread, or what was left behind.
Without conclusive investigations, you’re not reducing risk — you’re just postponing it. The result?
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Repeat incidents that drain resources.
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Compliance gaps auditors won’t forgive.
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Frustrated analysts fighting the same battles over and over.
This is the readiness gap at the heart of most SOCs.
The Readiness Gap
Too often, investigations begin after detection, with incomplete data scattered across tools and environments. By then:
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Analysts waste time pivoting between tools and dashboards.
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Context is lost in handoffs between teams.
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Responders and threat hunters start from scratch instead of building on downstream work.
It’s no wonder investigations drag on, adversaries persist, and SOCs burn out.
Investigative readiness flips this model. It means having complete, correlated, forensic-grade visibility when you need it — so when an alert fires, your team can move directly into scoping, validating, hunting, and resolving with confidence.
We’ve written more about this shift in From Context to Confidence: Why Forensics is the New Context in Modern SOCs
It’s About Skills, Not Just Numbers
As Google’s SOC modernization leaders highlight, the SOC talent conversation is too often about headcount. But investigations aren’t just a numbers game, they’re a skills game.
Deep investigations demand:
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Knowing what data to collect.
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Understanding how to interpret it in context.
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Connecting dots across endpoints, cloud, and network activity.
Those skills are rare and in many SOCs, they live in just a handful of senior analysts. This creates dependency and delay.
Investigation & Response Automation changes the equation. It doesn’t replace expertise, it democratizes it. With complete, correlated forensic visibility embedded into investigation workflows, every analyst becomes an investigator and can contribute to a conclusive response. The senior responders focus on the truly complex cases, while the whole team operates at a higher level.
Old Paradigms Are Holding Us Back
The traditional “tiered SOC” model, where juniors triage and seniors investigate, was built for a different era. Automation has chipped away at basic triage and AI has enabled quick summarization for all levels, the rest of the process is still locked in old workflows and methodologies, passing tickets between teams, collecting and re-collecting data, and losing context at every handoff.
These old habits come at a cost:
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Duplicated effort when different teams work the same incident in isolation.
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Data silos that make it impossible to see the full scope of an attack.
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Delays that give adversaries time to persist, pivot, and cover their tracks, often creating bigger problems.
That’s why SOCs need more than faster triage or smarter summaries — they need true investigative capability built into their daily workflows.
The Vision Behind Investigation & Response Automation
Investigation & Response Automation (AIR), or Cloud Investigation and Response (CIRA), is not another connector layer like SOAR or hyperautomation, and it’s not another AI SOC chasing alerts. It is the enabler of investigations, embedding forensic-driven investigative capabilities directly into the SOC’s daily workflow.
With AIR, triage becomes faster and sharper because the forensic evidence is already in place — but it doesn’t stop there. AIR carries teams beyond initial containment into full investigation: scoping, hunting, and resolving with conclusive, forensic-grade confidence.
A modern investigative environment should deliver:
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Forensic data at your fingertips — ready to query, filter, and correlate without waiting or context-switching.
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Embedded, filterable timeline analysis — every event, artifact, and finding in one place, linked to case context from the start.
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Complete hybrid visibility — from on-prem to cloud, closing blind spots before they’re exploited.
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Assistive AI and intelligence alongside analysts — surfacing anomalies, guiding pivots, and prioritizing leads to accelerate human judgment.
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Workflow freedom: integrate via API or webhooks, inject forensic context into your existing stack, or work entirely within a unified investigative hub. No lock-in.
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Continuous readiness — investigations and hunts start with the evidence already enriched and prioritized.
See It in Action
On September 10, our Chief Investigator, Lee Sult, will walk through how Automated Investigation and Response empowers teams to deliver faster investigations, forensic-grade confidence, and answers you can’t get anywhere else — without silos, without delays.
