Disclosure: This article was provided by ANY.RUN. The information and analysis presented are based on their research and findings.
What slows your Security Operations Center (SOC) down when a critical alert hits? For many teams, it’s not the alert itself but the time lost searching for clarity, switching between tools, and trying to confirm what’s real and what’s noise.
Leading SOCs have already started adopting specific strategies that help them cut this delay, shorten response time, and keep control even during heavy alert loads. Let’s discover what these strategies are and how you can bring them into your workflow.
Why Response Time Slows Down
Most delays inside a SOC come from one simple problem: analysts don’t get the right information fast enough. When an alert arrives without context, the team has to dig for answers; check logs, compare sources, wait for results from separate tools. Minutes disappear before anyone can say whether the threat is serious or not.
This gap creates three predictable issues:
- Uncertain prioritisation: Teams waste time on alerts that don’t matter.
- Slow confirmation: Analysts spend too long verifying what the threat is actually doing.
- Longer MTTR: The whole response chain stretches because early steps take too much time.
This is exactly where high-performing SOCs have changed their approach: they focus on cutting the “uncertainty window” at the very beginning of the process.
Strategy 1: Get Clarity Early to Avoid Wasting Time
One pattern stands out across fast, well-organised SOCs: they reduce uncertainty at the very beginning of an alert. Instead of waiting for scattered tools to catch up, many teams now rely on interactive sandboxes like ANY.RUN to see what the threat is actually doing within moments.
For most samples, analysts receive a clear verdict in about 60 seconds, and in many cases, the full attack chain becomes visible almost instantly. This cuts down the usual back-and-forth, removes guesswork, and lets the team decide on the next steps without delay.
When clarity arrives this quickly, response time drops sharply, and the entire workflow moves with far more confidence and control.
Strategy 2: Automate Early Steps to Speed Up Your Response Cycle
A surprising amount of lost time inside a SOC comes from actions that don’t require analyst expertise at all; opening lures, clicking through fake pages, solving CAPTCHAs, following redirects, or coaxing a threat to finally reveal itself. These tiny steps slow down the very beginning of the response cycle, making it harder for teams to react quickly when it matters most.
Leading SOCs avoid this slowdown by automating the early phase of alert validation. ANY.RUN’s automated interactivity blends automation with human-like actions: it can follow QR-code chains, interact with fake login pages, trigger multi-stage loaders, and bypass common barriers that usually require manual effort. All of this happens automatically, within seconds.
As a result, teams report up to a 20% decrease in Tier 1 workload and fewer unnecessary Tier 1-to-Tier 2 escalations, because routine checks no longer require human time. Analysts get to the important part of the investigation faster, and the whole response cycle moves noticeably quicker.
Strategy 3: Strengthen Collaboration So Your Response Doesn’t Stall
A SOC can move quickly only if everyone involved sees the same picture and works from the same information. When data is scattered, screenshots in chats, logs in tickets, partial notes in emails, the response slows down simply because teams spend too much time syncing.
Leading SOCs avoid this by giving analysts, engineers, and incident responders a shared workspace with consistent, ready-to-use data. ANY.RUN makes this simple: every analysis generates a structured report with timelines, IOCs, network details, and behavioural highlights, all in a format that can be shared instantly across teams and tools.
This removes the usual communication lag, cuts back on repeated checks, and ensures that everyone involved can act immediately without waiting for clarification. The result is faster coordination, cleaner handoffs, and a response process that keeps moving instead of stopping to gather missing details.
Achieve the Response Speed Your SOC Needs
As you can see, reaching ultra-fast response time is absolutely possible when teams combine the right strategies with solutions designed to remove delays from the very start of an alert. SOCs using ANY.RUN’s sandbox has already proven this through measurable, real-world results from our latest survey:
- Up to 21 minutes reduced MTTR per incident
- 95% of SOC teams speed up threat investigations
- 94% of users report faster triage
- 3× SOC efficiency boost
- 24× more unique IOCs to power downstream detection
- Fewer false positives and more accurate prioritisation
If you want to see how much faster your team can operate with the same advantages, there’s only one way to know: Try ANY.RUN and measure the difference yourself.
Free Webinar: SOC Leader’s Playbook – 3 Steps to Faster MTTR
For readers who want a deeper look at practical ways to speed up incident response, ANY.RUN is hosting a one-hour session titled “SOC Leader’s Playbook: 3 Steps to Faster MTTR.” It will take place on 25 November 2025 at 16:00 CET.
During the webinar, experts will cover how leading SOCs:
- Cut MTTR by 21 minutes per incident
- Detect new attacks earlier with intelligence from 15,000 organisations
- Achieve a 3× performance boost by reducing false positives
Save your seat now to get a clear, structured playbook for speeding up detection and response.