Cisco Elevates the SOC with Agentic AI for Faster Threat Response and Reduced Complexity

Splunk Enterprise Security Premier Edition and Essentials Edition advance unified threat detection and response

Cisco introduced Splunk Enterprise Security Essentials Edition and Splunk Enterprise Security Premier Edition, providing customers two agentic AI-powered SecOps options that unify security workflows across threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR). Delivered within Splunk Enterprise Security 8.2 – a market-leading SIEM solution – these advancements streamline offerings and empower customers with faster threat response and simplified security solutions. Cisco also unveiled a series of AI features that it intends to release to power the agentic Security Operations Center (SOC) of the future, enabling analysts to focus on strategic decision-making while AI handles routine tasks.

With many Cisco security products already integrated with Splunk Enterprise Security, the latest features will place agentic AI at the core of the SOC and extend security intelligence seamlessly across the network. With Splunk, AI agents do more than actively orchestrate and automate complex workflows; they transform manual tasks into proactive, autonomous security operations. This transformation streamlines comprehensive threat management, empowering security teams to act faster and more efficiently.

“Adversaries are already using AI, so defenders need to seize every possible advantage,” said Mike Horn, SVP and GM for Splunk Security. “Our security offerings unify detection, investigation, and response into a single, intuitive workspace, eliminating tool fragmentation and significantly boosting efficiency. Built-in AI can help cut alert noise and reduce investigation time from hours to minutes. Now every SOC can better position to stay ahead of advanced threats and empower analysts at every level.”

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Powering the Agentic SOC
Many organizations drown in data but struggle to know what matters and when to act. This leads to operational blind spots and inefficiencies across SecOps, ITOps, and engineering teams. It delays timely detection and response exposing the business to avoidable threats.

To help prevent these issues and build an agentic SOC with greater visibility and context, customers can select between two flexible solutions:

• Splunk Enterprise Security Premier Edition: Brings together Splunk Enterprise Security 8.2, Splunk SOAR, Splunk UEBA, and Splunk AI Assistant into a comprehensive offering with unified user experience.
  
• Splunk Enterprise Security Essentials Edition: Combines Splunk Enterprise Security 8.2 and Splunk AI Assistant in Security into a single offering with unified user experience.

“With today’s increasingly sophisticated threats and sprawling attack surfaces, security teams can’t afford to waste time switching between fragmented tools and operating with siloed visibility,” said Michelle Abraham, Research Director, Security and Trust at IDC. “By integrating multiple security capabilities into a single, cohesive environment, security platforms empower organizations to move from reactive to proactive security, streamlining workflows, improving detection and response, and ultimately reducing risk.”

Agentic AI for Security
As security challenges become more complex, organizations need integrated solutions that enhance visibility, accelerate detection, and streamline response. Additional AI-powered advancements are being released to strengthen security operations through the following:

• Triage Agent: AI-powered triage evaluates, prioritizes, and explains alerts—even in long-tail, low-volume cases—reducing analyst workload and surfacing what matters most.
• Malware Reversal Agent: AI-driven reversing explains malicious scripts line-by-line, extracts indicators of compromise, flags evasion, and groups recurring behaviors.
• AI Playbook Authoring: Translates natural language intent into functional, tested SOAR playbooks, with AI helping every step of the way.
• Response Importer: AI agents adhere to standard operating procedures (SOPs) defined by the SOC and use multi-modal LLMs to import SOPs into Enterprise Security response plans.
• AI-Enhanced Detection Library: Helps detections to go from hypothesis to production in minutes.
• Personalized Detection SPL Generator: Personalizes detections within the library to align with unique SOC environments to make them usable out of the box.

Cisco Integrations Accelerate the SOC with Agentic AI
By integrating with Cisco’s security solutions, Splunk helps security teams detect, investigate, and respond to threats with greater speed and precision. Expanded offerings will include:

• Isovalent Runtime Security (eBPF) into Splunk: Delivers immediate, granular visibility across your workloads, quickly pinpointing potential security breaches and infrastructure anomalies.
• Federating Cisco Firewall Data: Integration between Splunk Cloud Platform’s Federated Search for Amazon S3 and Security Analytics and Logging (SAL) will enable analysts to perform security analytics on firewall logs stored in SAL directly from Splunk Cloud Platform without the need for ingestion.