Simbian Announces The CISOs 2026 SOC Game Plan
Mountain View, Calif. – Simbian®, building Superintelligence for Accelerated Security, has unveiled their 2026 SOC Game Plan, designed to guide modern security leadership on how to plan, budget, and rebuild their security architecture around autonomy, not entropy.
By 2026, Gartner predicts that half of all SOCs will operate on AI-driven decision support. The latest Gartner Hype Cycle for Security Operations also marks the shift: SOCs are evolving into autonomous exposure engines powered by AI SOC Agents.
“It’s not about adding more tools or dashboards; it’s about re-engineering how security thinks and operates,” said Sumedh Barde, VP and Chief Product Officer (CPO) of Simbian. “Security leaders need to embrace the era of foresight and stop firefighting. The challenge isn’t to detect faster anymore. It’s to think faster than the next breach.”
As recently as August, Software Analyst Cyber Research reported from a survey of over 300 US CISOs that their SOC teams experienced an average of 982 alerts per day. Larger organizations reported over 3,000 alerts daily via 28+ different security tools. Alarmingly, 40% of alerts never get reviewed by the team. Mean time to investigate an alert takes up to 70 minutes.
Human analysts don’t have an edge over the malicious actors still spending roughly 30 minutes supervising their attacks, because they must break the operation into seemingly benign phases to bypass guardrails, filter hallucinations, and prioritize attack vectors. The main goal of AI SOC is to make even agentic attacks economically impractical.
Simbian recommends the following steps for organizations to implement an SOC Game Plan for 2026:
A 2026 Mandate: Evolve from detection-first to exposure-first security models.
CISOs Need to Leverage AI in the AI Era: Turn operational drag into measurable resilience with AI Agents.
Implement AI in Cybersecurity: Transform buzzwords into a pragmatic 2026 action plan.
Update Performance Metrics: Redefine performance and ROI for the age of autonomous operations.
“We’ve long heard that LLM adoption would drive an unprecedented rise in malicious actor activity. That moment has arrived,” said Ambuj Kumar, CEO and co-founder of Simbian. “Anthropic’s recent report indicated that their own technologies were misused to create the first publicly reported AI Spy which performed a multi-staged attack. Using tools it carried out reconnaissance by cataloging targetted infrastructure, identifying and validating vulnerabilities, harvesting credentials, moving laterally, collecting data, and exfiltrating intelligence. All of this required very little human intervention.”
Anthropic’s warning is clear: “AI SOC systems must operate at superhuman speed and therefore must be agentic.” In addition, Anthropic calls for “AI for defense in areas like SOC automation, threat detection, vulnerability assessment, and incident response.”
To access the Simbian 2026 CISO Game Plan, and webinar on this topic, please visit here.