A mid-market financial-services company replaced its alert-driven SOC with autonomous detection and response — and cut mean-time-to-respond by 90%. Here is how they did it.
The organization
A fast-growing fintech processing millions of transactions a day, operating in a heavily regulated environment with a lean security team of nine. Like most financial institutions, it was a constant target for credential theft, account takeover, and fraud — and its obligations to regulators left no room for a slow response.
The challenge
The team’s legacy SIEM generated more than 11,000 alerts a day. Analysts triaged what they could and closed the rest. Mean-time-to-respond for confirmed incidents averaged just over four hours — and that was during business hours. Overnight and on weekends, containment often waited until the next shift. In a fraud-driven threat model, four hours is an eternity.
“We weren’t short on talent. We were short on time. Every analyst was a full-time alert-acknowledgment machine.” — Director of Security Operations
The approach
The team deployed Kybernao alongside its existing SIEM, EDR, and identity provider — no rip-and-replace. Rollout followed a deliberate, staged path:
- Signals from endpoint, identity, and cloud were correlated into single incidents, immediately collapsing thousands of raw alerts into a few dozen ranked incidents a day.
- High-confidence, low-blast actions — revoking a compromised session, isolating a flagged host, blocking a known-bad indicator — were automated first, with blast-radius previews and full audit trails.
- Ambiguous cases routed to an analyst with one-click approval, keeping humans in the loop where judgment genuinely mattered.
The results
- 90% reduction in MTTR — from just over four hours to under 25 minutes for confirmed incidents, and seconds for the fully automated ones.
- Alert volume down 96% at the analyst tier, as correlation replaced raw alerts with ranked incidents.
- 24/7 consistency — containment no longer depended on who was awake.
- Analysts redeployed from triage to threat hunting and detection engineering.
“The first time the platform contained an account takeover at 3 a.m. and we read about it in the morning report — already handled — that is when it clicked.” — Director of Security Operations
Why it worked
The win wasn’t a single feature. It was collapsing the handoffs — detection to triage to approval to execution — that dominated the old response time. With guardrails and audit trails, the team could trust automation to act, and reserve human attention for the decisions that genuinely needed it.