Hyperautomation in Security: Simplifying SecOps with Precision and Speed

Hyperautomation in Cybersecurity: Solve the Unsolvable in Security Operations

The average SOC handles thousands of alerts per day, far exceeding what human analysts can realistically process. This deluge of data not only increases the risk of missing critical threats, but it can also lead to analyst burnout.

But the problem goes deeper than just alert volumes; it extends to the manual, repetitive processes behind them. These time-consuming processes are prone to error and prevent security teams from scaling their operations effectively. For many organizations, this inefficiency creates a bottleneck that hinders their ability to adapt and respond to evolving threats.

What’s needed isn’t just more automation, but a strategic overhaul in how security operations can scale and adapt. Organizations need a way to eliminate inefficiencies, unify processes and tools, and empower their teams to focus on high-value tasks. This is where hyperautomation comes in—designed to address these challenges by transforming how automation is applied across the SOC.

This article explores the concept of hyperautomation in security operations, its key benefits, the steps to implement it, and how, with the right implementation, it can transform security operations for organizations aiming to stay ahead of cyber threats.

What Is Hyperautomation in Security Operations?

We already know “automation”: the use of technology to execute repetitive, rule-based tasks without human intervention. This is old news in cybersecurity. Every modern SOC is using automation to some degree for threat detection, investigation, and response processes to keep up with threats and workload demands.

Many organizations have already seen some success with basic automation, such as implementing select actions for specific alerts and speeding up response times. The problem isn’t its effectiveness or that it was too short a word; it’s the level of effort required to scale automation across security operations. Scaling often reveals inefficiencies and silos in existing processes, requiring significant manual effort to configure, maintain, and adapt workflows—effort that many teams simply don’t have the resources to sustain.

This is where hyperautomation sets itself apart. Unlike traditional automation, which often focuses on isolated actions or workflows, hyperautomation is a strategic approach to scaling automation across an organization’s security operations. It emphasizes removing barriers to automation, enabling seamless integration of people, processes, and technologies to achieve end-to-end efficiency focused on four key components.

• Discovery: Identifying and mapping processes to uncover inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement.
• Automation: Using technologies like robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to automate repetitive tasks and enable smarter, faster decision-making.
• Orchestration: Integrating tools, workflows, and technologies into cohesive, end-to-end processes that eliminate process silos and scale automation across the organization.
• Optimization: Continuously improving workflows using analytics, human feedback, and AI to make them smarter, more efficient, and adaptable over time.

Key Benefits of Hyperautomation in SecOps

Hyperautomation marks a shift in how cybersecurity operations are managed, bringing about measurable improvements across investigation, response, and operational efficiency. By embracing hyperautomation, organizations can achieve transformative outcomes, including:

Enhanced Investigation and Response

Hyperautomation can develop, build, and run entire TDIR workflows, reducing an organization’s mean time to contain (MTTC) and respond (MTTR) to threats.

Increased Operational Efficiency

Just like traditional automation, hyperautomation does not aim to replace human analysts. Instead, it empowers them to focus on strategic tasks and improves their quality of life.

• Automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, such as log correlation or vulnerability prioritization, reduces analyst burnout.
• Resulting time savings free your team to focus on high-value activities like proactive threat hunting and skills development.

Improved Accuracy and Consistency

Humans are prone to error, especially when performing manual, repetitive tasks under pressure. With hyperautomation, you can be sure processes are repeated perfectly every time.

• By minimizing human error in repetitive processes, hyperautomation ensures consistent execution of security workflows.
• AI and ML models continuously learn from past incidents, improving accuracy in detecting anomalies and adapting workflows to new threats.

Scalability

Unlike traditional approaches, hyperautomation enables scalability without requiring extensive manual reconfiguration or specialized expertise, making it adaptable to evolving needs.

What You Need to Adopt Hyperautomation

Adopting a hyperautomation strategy is a journey, not a one-time project. Here are the most important tools and capabilities you’ll need to fully frame out hyperautomation in your security operations ecosystem:

• A Unified, Robust Technology Stack: First, you’ll need a comprehensive set of cybersecurity tools. But to reap the most benefits from hyperautomation, your tools can’t operate in silos. Build an integrated ecosystem by connecting your tools (SIEM, EDR, IAM etc.) through APIs to a unified security operations platform. This integration enables seamless data sharing, orchestration, and automation across your environment.
• Adaptive Threat Detection and Investigation: By leveraging AI and ML, organizations can apply hyperautomation to threat detection and enrichment processes, aiding in anomaly detection, alert prioritization, and contextual data analysis. This reduces noise, speeds up investigations, and empowers analysts with actionable insights.
• Orchestrated and Scalable Response: Workflow designs and bi-directional integrations enable platform end-to-end process automations such as researching IOCs, validating user activity, resetting compromised accounts, or notifying relevant teams – all within one, complete workflow. This ensures a consistent, scalable, and rapid response to threats, minimizing manual intervention and reducing MTTR.

8 Steps to Implement Hyperautomation

Implementing hyperautomation at any organization calls for a well-documented plan that maximizes your current ecosystem’s output. Here’s a roadmap your team can follow, both in the short and the long term.

Short-Term Steps: Building the Foundation for Hyperautomation

1. Start with your biggest bottlenecks: Conduct a maturity assessment of your team’s current tools, processes, and IR workflows to establish baselines. Frameworks like NIST or MITRE ATT&CK can guide your evaluation of incident response effectiveness, while resources like CISA’s Incident Response Playbooks can provide actionable steps for structuring and refining your processes. Broader frameworks like CMMI can also help assess overall operational maturity. You can also use criteria such as:

• Process frequency and volume
• Complexity and variability
• ROI potential and business objective impact

Alert triage and phishing email analysis are good examples of high-speed tasks with a high potential for human error.

TIP: Try to hyperautomate tasks that will build momentum with quick wins that can help demonstrate ROI down the road.

2. Align on success criteria: Meet with stakeholders to create a detailed process map from task origination through analyzation and optimization. Once you have consensus on the new standard for each workflow, document and share it, then set goals and KPIs. Revisit these metrics regularly to adapt them to changing rules or requirements in your business.

Here are a few key metrics to keep track of during goal setting:

1. MTTC / mean time to contain: The time it takes from alert creation to containment action(s) executed.
2. MTTR / mean time to resolve: The time it takes to resolve and close an incident.
3. Workload reduction: The decrease in manual tasks handled by security teams or IT staff.

3. Design automated workflows: Now, replicate your new automated workflows across your integrated system. Map your workflow triggers, core actions, and decision logic, and set alert conditions to keep you and your team in the loop while threats are remediated.

4. Start small and test thoroughly: It’s time to implement your hyperautomation processes—but start small. It’s safest to begin with low-risk tasks and monitor them closely to validate the hyperautomation processes are performing accurately. Test more complex workflows in sandbox environments before introducing them to your live ecosystem.

TIP: Ensure automated processes include appropriate checks and balances to avoid over-reliance on AI or automation in critical decisions.

Long-Term Steps: Scaling and Optimizing Hyperautomation

5. Scale smarter with AI and ML: Use machine learning to identify anomalies and unusual traffic patterns, and pair it with AI to contextualize findings and take actions like quarantining phishing emails or blocking fraudulent transactions. This combination can handle larger data volumes while reducing manual workloads.

6. Monitor and refine: Hyperautomation isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it strategy. Schedule regular team check-ins to monitor or adjust automation outputs for accuracy.

7. Upskill and educate your team: Now that you’ve eliminated silos across your tools, systems, and processes, encourage collaboration and transparency across your security, IT, and DevOps teams too. Through cross-functional training, all team members can learn how automation operates across different departments and functions.

TIP: Promote a culture where automation is seen as augmentation, not a replacement, of human expertise.

8. Showcase your wins: When communicating results with CISOs and other business leaders, focus on tangible results. Use data to highlight the ROI of hyperautomation initiatives and their contributions to cost savings, operational efficiency, and improved security outcomes.

The Ultimate Solution to SOC Hyperautomation: ReliaQuest GreyMatter

Security teams today face an uphill battle: too many alerts, disconnected tools, and not enough hands to manage it all. These challenges don’t just lead to inefficiencies, they leave organizations exposed to evolving threats, with analysts stuck in task management instead of focusing on what matters most.

ReliaQuest GreyMatter is designed to tackle these challenges head-on. By reducing the low-brain, high-time activities that bog down your team, GreyMatter gives analysts the freedom to focus on higher-value work. With agentic AI and orchestration, GreyMatter automates complex workflows, enables faster, smarter decisions, and unifies your tools and processes so your entire environment works together seamlessly.

Thanks to its agnostic architecture, GreyMatter integrates seamlessly with your existing tools, and its intuitive design means analysts of any experience level can operate like seasoned pros. Whether it’s automating repetitive tasks or scaling responses across your ecosystem, GreyMatter helps you take control of your operations–on your terms.