The Case for SOC Augmentation: Empowering Analysts, Not Replacing Them

SOCs are under constant pressure, facing an overwhelming amount of alerts and data. Security analysts often find themselves swamped by repetitive tasks, unable to dedicate time to high-value activities like investigating critical threats or proactive threat hunting. While fully automated systems are sometimes touted as the solution, they risk sidelining the human expertise necessary for effective cybersecurity and countering more complex threats. An alternative approach is SOC augmentation—empowering analysts with tools that amplify their capabilities without replacing them. The Cado platform is designed precisely to achieve this balance.

Addressing Analyst Overload

The Cado platform alleviates this burden by automating the tedious, time-consuming steps of incident response. By handling tasks like data collection, processing, and initial analysis, Cado allows analysts to focus their energy on meaningful investigations and strategic security planning. This workflow reduces the risk of missing critical alerts and directly improves Mean Time to Response (MTTR)—a key metric for measuring incident response efficiency.

Alerts in the Cado platform 

An Example

Before optimization

An example of a typical ticket with limited information given to the SOC analyst

After optimization

Example of a ticket which has been automatically enriched by Cado Response

With the Cado Platform, analysts start with analysis rather than shipping data around and jumping through hoops. The enriched ticket gives the analyst a fully contextualized view of what has happened in and around the event of interest. This alone can massively improve the time to resolve a ticket and let you do more with less. By processing the additional data the analyst gains a much wider context of the event and enables faster and more confident decision-making, driving efficiency in their role as the first line of defense. Where a ticket should be escalated, the escalation happens much faster reducing the impact of an incident.

The Cado Platform

Streamlining Workflows Through Automation and Insights

Cado enhances analyst productivity through several core features:

1. AI-Driven Automation: Cado automates tasks, such as ingesting and processing forensic data, and surfaces actionable insights. Analysts are presented with concise, prioritized intelligence rather than being forced to sift through mountains of raw data.
   
   
2. Simplified Cloud Investigations: The platform’s intuitive interface enables analysts, even those without deep cloud expertise, to navigate complex incidents quickly. By reducing the need for specialized skills, Cado helps SOCs address the cybersecurity skill shortage that plagues the industry.
   
   
3. Data-Driven Insights: Cado empowers analysts to make faster, more accurate decisions with comprehensive, visualized data. Features like event timelines enable analysts to reconstruct an incident with ease, identifying root causes and understanding its full scope. This level of detail is critical for effective remediation and future threat prevention.

Improving SOC Team Efficiency

The goal of SOC augmentation is not to replace human analysts but to help them work smarter. By leveraging Cado’s capabilities:

• Analysts spend less time on repetitive, manual tasks.
• Investigations become faster and more comprehensive.
• Security teams can proactively hunt for threats and strengthen their organization’s security posture.

For example, Cado’s timeline reconstruction allows analysts to visualize events leading up to and following an incident, while its robust search interface quickly surfaces key details. These tools collectively enable a faster, more effective response.

Timeline in Cado

Empowering the Human Element in Cybersecurity

The human element remains irreplaceable in cybersecurity. Automation can process data at scale, but only experienced analysts can interpret nuanced patterns, make strategic decisions, and innovate new defense approaches. Cado’s platform enhances—not replaces—this expertise. By removing the drudgery of manual tasks, it enables analysts to focus on areas where they add the most value: investigation, analysis, and planning.

Cado’s platform is built to empower SOC analysts, not displace them. By automating routine tasks, delivering actionable insights, and simplifying complex cloud investigations, Cado transforms overwhelmed SOCs into efficient, focused operations. In today’s challenging security landscape, this approach enables security teams to protect their organizations more effectively while keeping critical human expertise at the center of cybersecurity.