"Believe the Hype"
How Liberty University Achieves Proactive SecOps with GreyMatter Agentic AI
Liberty University is one of the nation's largest private institutions with over 140,000 students enrolled on campus in Lynchburg, VA, and online worldwide.
The Challenge and the Outcome
- Thousands of daily attacks requiring manual triage across disconnected tools
- An MDR provider that returned alerts without enrichment, forcing re-investigation
- Heavy reliance on institutional knowledge and hours of manual correlation
- Rising burnout, low confidence in external alerts, and limited capacity for proactive work
- 90% of alert noise eliminated, freeing analysts from repetitive triage
- 85% improvement in visibility across the security environment
- Analysts now focus on advanced investigations, phishing analysis, and strategic initiatives
- Burnout eliminated — team capabilities amplified with agentic AI as a teammate
Overview
Securing that global footprint means protecting a technology stack as diverse and complex as any large enterprise—learning management systems, academic databases, IT infrastructure, and the sensitive data of hundreds of thousands of students, faculty, and staff—all with a small security team.
"There's something unique about the university space. It's a combination of being an attractive target and a culture of openness. And those two things are at odds with each other."
Brian Johnson Director of IT Security, Liberty UniversityBurned and Buried by Alert Noise
Before GreyMatter, Johnson's team faced thousands of attacks each day. Triaging every alert meant manually correlating data across disconnected tools, relying on institutional knowledge, and spending hours researching whether a threat was legitimate. An MDR provider they used prior to GreyMatter only added to the burden, sending alerts back to Liberty's team without enrichment and forcing analysts to re-investigate each one.
As a result, the team spent too much valuable time on repetitive triage with little capacity for the proactive, strategic work needed to strengthen their security posture. Burnout was rising across the team, confidence in external alerts had reached a new low, and threats were moving faster than ever.
Achieving Proactive Security with GreyMatter Agentic AI
With GreyMatter, Liberty broke out of the reactive cycle—eliminating 90% of alert noise and improving visibility by 85%. Alerts now arrive with the correlation, and context analysts need to respond faster and more effectively.
At the center of that shift is GreyMatter's agentic AI, which Johnson describes as "a teammate of my security team." It handles the correlation, enrichment, and pattern-matching in minutes that once consumed hours of manual effort.
Analysts now focus on advanced investigations, phishing analysis, and broader security initiatives, while Johnson confidently reports to university leadership with data-backed recommendations that drive stronger strategic decisions.
Learn How GreyMatter Agentic AI Scales Your Security Operations
GreyMatter is an agentic AI security operations platform with 6 agentic Teammates that use hundreds of agent skills and AI tools to work toward an objective, not just tasks.
