Rethinking MDR: How Agentic AI Delivers Autonomous Security at Scale

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In an era where cyber threats are outpacing human capacity and talent shortages are straining already overloaded security teams, the managed detection and response (MDR) model is reaching a breaking point. Most MDR providers still rely heavily on human analysts to investigate and resolve complex threats — a model that simply doesn’t scale with today’s volume, velocity, and sophistication of attacks.

At Ontinue, we believe it’s time to rethink the foundation of MDR. The future isn’t about more analysts. It’s about more autonomy. And that’s where Agentic AI comes in.

The Scalability Crisis in MDR

Traditional MDR providers are hitting a wall. Their ability to deliver high-quality threat detection and response depends on having enough analysts to manually investigate and respond to alerts. This worked when threat volumes were manageable — but in today’s landscape, it’s unsustainable. The increasing complexity of attacks, combined with massive data volumes from cloud, endpoint, identity, and log sources, is creating a scale challenge that legacy approaches can’t solve.

Even with automation for Tier 1 triage, incidents still get escalated to humans for deeper investigation. These Tier 2 and Tier 3 investigations are time-consuming and require skilled, experienced analysts who are in short supply. It’s a bottleneck that slows response, increases risk, and leaves customers shouldering more of the work.

Agentic AI changes that equation.

What Is Agentic AI?

Agentic AI represents a new class of AI that goes beyond traditional rule-based automation or basic machine learning. Instead of simply responding to pre-defined triggers, Agentic AI operates with purpose and autonomy. It can gather context from disparate sources, form hypotheses, test those hypotheses, and execute a complete investigation — just like a human analyst would.

In security operations, this means we can now automate investigations that previously required hands-on-keyboard attention from Tier 2 and Tier 3 analysts. And we can do it at machine speed.

This is not an incremental improvement. It’s a fundamental leap forward.

How Ontinue Is Applying Agentic AI in Production

At Ontinue, Agentic AI isn’t a concept — it’s already live and delivering results in production for every customer. We’ve integrated autonomous investigations into our ION SecOps platform using a multi-agent AI architecture that mirrors how a team of expert analysts would work together to investigate a threat.

When an incident is escalated to the Ontinue Cyber Defense Center, our AI agents automatically pull relevant telemetry across logs, identities, endpoints, and cloud environments. They correlate signals, build a working theory of the incident, test it against the data, and generate a comprehensive investigation summary for our human defenders to review. This gives our defenders a running head start on deciding how the best course of action is, whether it’s to conduct deeper analysis, trigger an automated response, or on rare occasions escalate to our customer for a response approval.  

The impact has been significant:

• Mean time to investigate has dropped by up to 50%
• 99.5% of incidents are resolved without any customer involvement
• Security teams have saved hundreds of hours of manual investigation work

You can check out our live demo here. 

Redefining MDR with Autonomy

This approach redefines what MDR can — and should — be. We’re no longer just detecting threats and sending alerts to our customers. We’re resolving them. And we’re doing it in a way that is scalable, consistent, and precise.

This is the key to overcoming the scalability challenge that has historically held MDR back. With Agentic AI, we can apply expert-level analysis to every incident, 24/7, without relying solely on human bandwidth. That means our customers can finally offload more of the investigation burden — and focus on what matters most to their business.

This evolution hasn’t gone unnoticed. A recently published IDC Link¹ recognized Ontinue’s work in this space, stating that “Ontinue’s use of deterministic and agentic AI for incident investigation represents a leap forward in MDR capabilities. This innovation not only improves the speed and consistency of threat detection and incident investigation but also empowers security teams to focus on strategic initiatives, ultimately driving better business outcomes.”

Beyond Hype: Why Agentic AI Matters

In a crowded market where everyone claims to “use AI,” it’s important to cut through the noise. True Agentic AI isn’t just another marketing label. It’s a real, architectural and technological shift that enables autonomy and advanced reasoning. It’s what separates surface-level automation from transformative operational capability.

As we look ahead, the most successful security operations centers won’t be those with the largest headcounts — they’ll be the ones that blend human judgment with AI autonomy to investigate and respond at scale.

That’s the future we’re building at Ontinue. And it’s already here.

¹“IDC Link, Ontinue Raises the Bar for SOC Automation, 11 Jun 2025”