Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Chris Kissel, Vice President of IDC Security & Trust, just drew a line in the sand for the AI SOC category with one simple sentence: “Vendors that can show their agents reason transparently, act within defined guardrails, and improve with each investigation will define this category. The rest will be measured against them.” We couldn’t agree more.

A security operations centre (SOC) is the team that watches your systems around the clock and steps in when an attacker gets past your defences. Its job is to find intruders quickly and contain them before reaching anything critical. Few businesses have their own in-house SOC. Most get the same 24/7 cover from a managed SOC, run by a specialist provider. Either way, what happens in the first few hours of an attack determines how much damage is done.

David Melamed is Head of Emerging Technologies at Torq. He joined through Torq’s acquisition of Jit, which he co-founded and has led as CTO since 2020, building agentic security on a production Context Graph. A cloud security veteran with 20+ years of experience, David previously held senior technical roles at Cisco (via the CloudLock acquisition) and MyHeritage. For all the gods and monsters in The Odyssey, the ship mostly moves for one reason: men row it.

Every vendor in this category now says the same word: agentic. I understand why. It’s what the market wants to hear. But when you’re the one signing the contract, “agentic” tells you almost nothing. I’ve sat on the buying side of enough of these conversations to know that the label and the capability are often two very different things.

SOC metrics are quantifiable measures of how well a security operations center detects, investigates, and contains threats. The metrics that matter most are mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), and incident closure rate, because together they show speed, effectiveness, and reliability, not just activity.

John White is the Field CISO for EMEA at Torq. A respected security executive with more than 20 years of leadership experience, John previously served as CISO at Virgin Atlantic, where he led a multi-year transformation deploying the Torq AI SOC Platform to modernize cyber operations. Prior to Virgin Atlantic, he built and transformed security functions for global organizations, including ASOS, Liberty Global, AEG Europe, and KPMG.