97% Say Automation Is ‘Business‑Critical’ — Is Your SOC Still Herding Cyber Cats Manually?

Automation crowned king: 97% of UK organisations now call it business‑critical

On 20th November 2025 a report from ThreatQuotient, a Securonix company, made plain what many security teams already suspected: cyber security automation is now business‑critical for 97% of UK organisations. That single figure is less a survey result and more a neon sign — organisations are rapidly treating automation as a plank of their defence posture rather than a nice‑to‑have toy for analysts with too much time and too many dashboards.

Why that 97% matters (and why your SOC shouldn’t be the office’s last manual process)

Automation is no longer about flashy demos. It underpins faster detection, repeatable containment, and consistent enrichment of alerts so analysts can focus on judgement‑based decisions rather than endless clicking. Practically speaking, when configured well, automation:

• reduces mean time to respond (MTTR) by handling routine triage and containment;
• scales threat response during spikes without hiring the equivalent of an army of on‑call wizards;
• helps tame alert fatigue by escalating only the incidents that really matter;
• provides auditable workflows — crucial for post‑incident reviews and regulatory scrutiny;
• frees skilled staff to work on threat hunting, threat modelling and defensive innovation rather than repetitive chores.

And yes, your board will like the predictability — but don’t automate your way into complacency. Machines are brilliant at repetition; people are still better at nuance and context.

Practical priorities for getting automation right

Organisations that rush into broad automation without preparation tend to create brittle playbooks and noisy outputs. Based on established industry practice and what we’re seeing across customer engagements at Synergos Consultancy, prioritise the following steps:

1. Visibility first: ensure your telemetry is reliable and comprehensive. Automation is only as effective as the data that fuels it.
2. Start small with measurable pilots: pick a low‑risk, high‑value use case (phishing triage, credential stuffing detection) and measure MTTR, false positives and analyst time saved.
3. Integrate, don’t bolt on: connect automation to SIEM, endpoint and identity platforms via well‑documented APIs and playbooks.
4. Maintain human‑in‑the‑loop for critical actions: automatically collect and enrich evidence, but require explicit authorisation for destructive or high‑impact responses.
5. Governance and testing: version control playbooks, test them in staging, and run tabletop exercises to validate outcomes under pressure.

Common pitfalls

• Poor data quality, which turns automation into an expensive generator of false positives;
• Overreliance on vendor defaults without tuning for the organisation’s threat profile;
• Lack of rollback or safety checks for automated containment actions.

Automation: shield and target — the double‑edged sword of modern ops

Automation helps defenders regain time, but the wider threat landscape reminds us it isn’t a magic wand. Adversaries are also automating reconnaissance and lateral movement, and some campaigns increasingly weave AI and autonomous agents into their toolchains. The defensive imperative, therefore, is twofold: adopt automation to regain speed and consistency, and design resilient controls to detect when automation itself becomes a target or a channel for escalation.

Boardroom checklist — what leaders should ask today

Boards and CISOs should be asking straightforward, actionable questions rather than vendor slogans. Key items include:

• Do we have an automation strategy aligned to our risk appetite and compliance obligations?
• Where have we measured ROI and analyst time saved?
• Are our playbooks versioned, tested and auditable?
• What is our escalation path when automation produces unexpected outcomes?
• Are we investing enough in staff training so people can validate and improve automated decisions?

Simple checks like these prevent dramatic headlines and awkward post‑incident inquiries — and they show that automation is a controlled capability, not a magic button.

How Synergos Consultancy sees the path forward (with a human‑centred wink)

At Synergos Consultancy we’ve observed teams that treat automation as a partner rather than a replacement achieve the best outcomes. That partner should be predictable, auditable and humble — the sort of colleague who does the boring stuff reliably, so your analysts can drink proper coffee and do the creative problem solving that machines can’t. Organisations that balance technical guardrails with human oversight are the ones that turn that 97% stat into measurable resilience rather than a vanity metric.

Automation isn’t the end game — it’s the foundation. Build it carefully, test it often, and keep humans in the loop for the decisions that matter. Do that, and you’ll stop manually herding cyber cats and start managing a well‑oiled defence machine.