Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Patrick Orzechowski (also known as “PO”) is Torq’s Field CISO, bringing his years of experience and expertise as a SOC leader to our customers. PO is a seasoned security veteran with a deep understanding of the modern security landscape. You can find him talking to SOC leaders and CISOs from major brands at cybersecurity events around the world. Running a SOC isn’t for the faint of heart. I should know.

When a cyberattack occurs, every second counts. Metrics like Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) are critical benchmarks in cybersecurity, helping organizations evaluate the effectiveness of their Security Operations Centers (SOCs). But what’s the difference between MTTD vs MTTR, and why do they matter?

If you’ve been in cybersecurity longer than five minutes, you know one thing: legacy SOC architecture isn’t just showing its age — it’s creaking under the weight of today’s threats. Cybersecurity analyst Francis Odum nailed it when presenting at Torq’s SKO 2025: “Legacy SOAR assumed everything starts in the SIEM. Now, teams connect automation directly to EDR, email, and identity systems.”.

Every day, analysts are buried under a mountain of low-value and often meaningless alerts. And they’re expected to triage, investigate, prioritize, and respond to all of them — faster, better, and with fewer people. With this comes cybersecurity alert fatigue, which can lead to missed threats, slower response times, and SOC analyst burnout. The good news is that SOC analysts don’t have to live like this anymore. Not if you have the right kind of AI working for you.

We live in a world where infrastructures reside entirely in the cloud, threats evolve faster than ever, and attackers never sleep. Manual security processes simply can’t keep pace. Cloud-native security automation is the critical solution for organizations to secure large attack surfaces.

Modern cloud threats move fast. Detection and response has to move faster. Wiz gives security teams the visibility and precision they need to detect real threats across sprawling cloud environments. Torq turns those threat detections into action — instantly. Together, they’re a cheat code for cloud security operations.

Many organizations come to Torq when they’ve hit a wall with their legacy SOAR platform. The migration to Torq isn’t just a technology upgrade — it’s an operational overhaul. With Torq, enterprises have replaced hundreds of rigid playbooks in weeks, dramatically reduced time-to-value, and unlocked capabilities that legacy SOAR could never support.

Despite being around for over 30 years, phishing is a bigger problem than ever for today’s SOCs. Phishing attacks have skyrocketed by 4,151% since the emergence of ChatGPT in 2022, leaving security teams drowning in phishing alert noise. And rather than getting better at recognizing phishing emails, humans are seemingly getting worse, in part due to the increasing phishing sophistication and customization at scale that GenAI offers.

The modern threat landscape doesn’t scale down just because your team is lean. Whether you’re a two-person SecOps crew or a full-blown SOC, attackers don’t discriminate — and the alerts don’t stop. Small security teams face the same phishing, ransomware, and insider threats as the world’s largest enterprises — only with fewer hands on deck and less time to respond. To level the playing field, teams are turning to SecOps automation.

Security Operations Centers (SOCs) continue to struggle in 2025. The perfect storm of growing alert volume, consistent talent shortage, and the well-documented limitations of legacy SOAR solutions have brought many SOC teams to a breaking point. At the same time, bad actors continue to innovate, and cybercriminals have become more sophisticated in their tactics and techniques, including using AI to launch attacks at scale.