Sophos’ Agentic SOC Compresses Threat Response to 89 Seconds
Sophos, a global cybersecurity leader, announced production
results from a full year of agentic operation inside Sophos Managed Detection
and Response (MDR), now defending 40,000 customers worldwide at 39% growth
year-over-year. The results define what an agentic Security Operations Center
(SOC) looks like at scale.
The volume of telemetry, complexity of the modern stack, and
structural imbalance between cybersecurity demand and available expertise have
outpaced what traditional SOC structures can manage, while adversaries adopt AI
without procurement cycles or governance friction. Sophos has re-architected
the SOC so AI absorbs the volume and senior analysts focus where judgment
matters, scaling expert response to organizations that cannot run full security
operations in-house. Through Sophos Central—the industry’s first AI-Native
Cybersecurity Defense System—endpoint, firewall, identity, SIEM, network, email,
cloud, threat intelligence, XDR, and MDR share a unified context lake,
integrated AI, and a single workflow. Open by design, it supports 350+
third-party integrations and delivers one of the most complete solutions for
Microsoft environments.
For Sophos MDR customers, the outcome is clear: threats
neutralized before they disrupt the business, and a defense system that keeps
pace with adversaries moving at AI speed.
The production data from the past twelve months sets a new
benchmark for managed security operations:
89 seconds from case creation to fully automated response.
This metric measures how fast the Sophos Central Defense System acts on cases
AI is authorized to resolve, translating directly into faster response and
stronger resilience against attacks that move at machine speed.
52% of MDR cases closed end-to-end by AI, without human
intervention required, inside boundaries continuously calibrated by analysts.
This metric measures the volume of work AI is doing autonomously, not just
alert triage or threat containment.
40,000 customers on the agentic model: Every Sophos MDR
customer benefits from the same agentic operating model, regardless of size or
segment, with intelligence compounding across every threat encountered.
Behind every Sophos MDR case is a Defense System that ingests tens of millions of detections daily, suppresses noise, correlates signals, and surfaces only what warrants action. The result is a sharply narrowed window where AI and human judgment are deployed against threats and the right response is delivered by the right responder.
“The agentic SOC is the new operating model for managed
security, and Sophos is defining what it looks like in production,” said Raja
Patel, president, Sophos. “When you run the world’s largest SOC, every threat
encountered makes every customer’s defense stronger. No other vendor operates
with our breadth, from small businesses to global enterprises with tens of
thousands of employees, and no other vendor compounds intelligence across that
scale. A customer using the Sophos Central Defense System benefits from the
learnings of every other customer in it.”
The new operating model
for managed security
Sophos operates both a human-on-the-loop (HOTL) and
human-in-the-loop (HITL) model within the agentic SOC: human-on-the-loop for
the high-volume, well-bounded work where speed matters, and human-in-the-loop
for high-stakes decisions where context, business impact, or novel adversary
behavior require an analyst’s judgment before action.
AI now handles the volume that previously consumed Tier 1 and
much of Tier 2 analyst time. Human analysts have shifted to higher-value work:
threat hunting, investigation, customer advisory, and governance of the
autonomous systems themselves.
“The 52% gets the attention, but the 48% is just as
important,” said Rob Harrison, SVP product management, Sophos. “When AI takes
the volume off the human queue, our analysts get the bandwidth to do the work
that requires their judgment: the novel attack patterns, the high-stakes
decisions, the cases where context and business implications matter. AI speed
and human judgment are the two halves of the same operating system, and
intelligence compounds across both with every threat we stop.”
Independent validations
across the market
Sophos has been recognized as a leader in MDR and across the
broader portfolio that supports it:
G2 Summer 2026: ranked #1 across five categories. Sophos was
named the top overall solution in Endpoint Protection, EDR, XDR, MDR, and
Firewall in the G2 Summer 2026 Reports, which are based entirely on verified
customer reviews. No other vendor in the cybersecurity industry has achieved
this across all five categories in a single season, and this is the eighth
consecutive quarter that Sophos MDR has been named the overall leader.
2026 Gartner® Peer Insights™ Voice of the Customer for
Managed Detection and Response (MDR). Sophos was named a 2026 Gartner® Peer
Insights™ Customers' Choice in the 2026 Gartner® Peer Insights™ Voice of the
Customer for Managed Detection and Response. Sophos had an overall rating of
4.8 / 5.0 based on 290 reviews, making Sophos the most-reviewed vendor in the
report.
KuppingerCole Analysts Leadership Compass for Managed
Detection and Response 2026. Sophos was recently named an Overall Leader in the
KuppingerCole Analysts Leadership Compass for MDR. Sophos was named a Leader in
four categories: Overall Leadership, Product Leadership, Innovation Leadership,
and Market Leadership.
Extending the agentic
model across Sophos’ portfolio
Sophos is extending the agentic operating model across the
rest of the company’s portfolio via Sophos Central through 2026. Investments
include the integration of XDR and Next-Gen SIEM capabilities into a unified
context lake, expansion of Secure AI capabilities for the new generation of
customer AI tooling, and the launch of Sophos CISO Advantage in fall 2026,
which will bring strategic security guidance to organizations with and without
security leadership in place. Each of these capabilities operates on the same
agentic foundation and Defense System that Sophos MDR has demonstrated this
past year.
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