At Recorded Future, we’re constantly looking for ways to help security teams work more efficiently so they can focus their expertise where it matters most: stopping threats before they impact business.

Over the past few years, as we spent time talking to our customers and observing the ways that their SOCs actually work day to day, we discovered a troubling pattern. Every Monday morning, analysts would begin a new round of threat hunts, manually gathering intelligence, writing queries for different tools, correlating findings, and documenting results. By Friday, they’d complete their reports. Meanwhile, attackers who may have breached the network on Tuesday may have already moved laterally, established persistence, and potentially exfiltrated data.

The manual operations gap

This inefficient approach to threat hunting wasn’t a people problem. It was a process problem.

We identified that traditional manual threat hunting required 27 separate steps, from selecting threat actors and gathering intelligence sources to validating anomalies and writing up reports for stakeholders.

Each of the 27 steps consumed hours of analyst time, and the entire manual workflow created what we now call the manual operations gap—the dangerous window between when threats emerge and when security teams can respond.

Rather than accept this gap as an inevitable reality, we asked ourselves a question: How many more threats could be prevented, and how could we improve organizations’ defenses overall, if we could make manual threat operations autonomous?

Rethinking manual workflows

Threat hunting represented the perfect use case for autonomous operations. It’s a critical security function that’s highly repetitive, spans multiple tools, requires constant updates as threats evolve, and must happen continuously—not just during business hours. We knew that if we could bring autonomous functionality to threat hunting, we could demonstrate a new model for security operations.

The breakthrough came from reimagining the entire workflow around a few core principles: intelligence-driven automation, seamless cross-tool orchestration, and continuous autonomous operations. Instead of analysts manually translating intelligence into queries for each security tool, what if their systems could automatically initiate hunts across SIEM, EDR, and other platforms simultaneously? Instead of analysts having to schedule weekly hunt cycles, what if threat hunting could run 24/7, adapting in real time as new intelligence emerged?

The result of this reimagining is Autonomous Threat Operations and the autonomous threat hunting capability, a new solution that reduces 27 manual steps to as few as 5 largely automated ones, delivering the speed, scale, and effectiveness that the modern threat landscape demands.

Closing the gap with autonomous operations

The transition from manual bottlenecks to autonomous operations isn't just about working faster—it's about working smarter. Security teams need workflows that scale their expertise rather than limit it, systems that integrate their existing investments rather than replace them, and processes that prove measurable ROI to justify continued investment.

Organizations that standardize on intelligence-led operations often demonstrate measurable gains in time to detect and time to respond. They can close the gap between threat emergence and defensive action, transforming security from a reactive cost center into a proactive risk-reduction function.

Want to see exactly how leading organizations are making this transformation? Our new playbook breaks down the specific steps for moving from manual threat hunting to autonomous operations—including the precise methodology for reducing complex, multi-day processes into streamlined workflows that run continuously.

Discover how to eliminate workflow bottlenecks, achieve 24/7 threat coverage, and prove the ROI of your security investments in the autonomous era.

Download: Reduce 27-step Threat Hunts to 5 Simple Steps