We are excited to announce that eSentire has been named the Best Agentic AI Security Platform at the Cybersecurity Stars Awards 2026, presented by The Hacker News. Winners are selected across categories spanning the breadth of the security landscape, from cloud and identity to managed services and emerging AI-driven capabilities.
The award recognizes the eSentire Atlas Platform and Controlled Autonomy SecOps operating model as the defining standard for how agentic AI should operate in enterprise security.
This recognition reflects what we have been building toward: a security operations model that delivers machine-speed outcomes without removing the human accountability layer that organizations, regulators, and cyber insurers depend on.
Earning the Best Agentic AI Security Platform designation places eSentire among the companies reshaping how enterprise security operations are designed and delivered, not just automating existing processes but rearchitecting what's possible when agentic AI operates with the right governance controls in place.
What Controlled Autonomy SecOps Actually Means
The conversation around agentic AI in security tends to run in one of two directions: either fully autonomous AI SOC systems that remove humans from the loop entirely, or incremental automation bolted onto legacy MDR workflows. Controlled Autonomy SecOps is a different operating model entirely.
Our operating model pairs agentic AI operatives, purpose-built within the Atlas Platform, with engineered human judgment controls that ensure every autonomous action is explainable, reversible, policy-bounded, and validated by Tier-3 analysts.
The four trust conditions that govern every autonomous action on the agentic AI Atlas Platform are:
- Explainability: Every decision the AI makes is visible and auditable.
- Reversibility: Autonomous actions can be reviewed and unwound if needed.
- Shadow Approval: High-consequence actions operate with human-on-the-loop controls.
- Policy-Bounded Authority: AI operatives act only within customer-defined authority envelopes.
This architecture matters increasingly as regulators, cyber insurers, and boards require not just speed and coverage, but demonstrable accountability for how security decisions are made.
The Continuous Security Lifecycle: Preempt, Detect, Respond
What sets us apart from both traditional MDR providers and point solution AI vendors is the breadth of the continuous security lifecycle that the Atlas Platform powers. Rather than addressing threat detection and response in isolation, we operate a unified model that brings together offensive validation, managed detection, and autonomous response as a single compounding flywheel.
Preempt: Our Autonomous Pen Testing and Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) capabilities continuously probe customer environments, map the full attack surface, run adversarial validation, and confirm exploitable attack paths across the full five-stage CTEM lifecycle. Recurring adversarial testing replaces point-in-time assessments with a continuously hardening posture.
Detect: Our 24/7 Managed Detection and Response (MDR) delivers multi-signal coverage across endpoint, cloud, network, identity, and email, with agentic AI that moves from raw signal to full threat context in under five minutes and a Mean Time to Engage of under 30 seconds. 100% of signals are triaged autonomously – no queue, no analyst pickup delay.
Respond: The Controlled Autonomous response pairs machine-speed containment with human-on-the-loop oversight. The three Agentic AI operative teams (Investigator, Critic, Reporter) handle investigation, escalation, and reporting, with every action policy-bounded, reversible, and validated by Tier-3 analysts. In independent validation, AI verdicts align with senior analyst judgment at a 95% rate.
This closed loop, where every exposure remediated shrinks the attack surface and every incident investigated makes the next response faster, is what the Continuous Security Flywheel means in practice.
Security at the Speed and Scale That Matters
Protecting 2,000+ organizations across 35+ industries in 80 countries, eSentire's outcomes speak directly to what the Controlled Autonomy model delivers in production environments:
- <30 second Mean Time to Engage (MTTE)
- 100% autonomous signal triage — no queue, no analyst pickup delay
- <5 minutes from signal to full threat context
- 99.99% initial host compromise prevention, with no lateral movement to a second device
- 99.1% no confirmed data exfiltration across customer environments
- 95% AI verdict agreement with Tier-3 senior analysts
- 200+ new detections added daily via Predictive Threat Defense
- 8–11X ROI compared to DIY or technology-only resourcing
No AI SOC startup can truly replicate the compounding threat intelligence that accrues from operating at this scale, across these many environments without decades of operational history.
Winning Best Agentic AI Security Platform from The Hacker News is a recognition of the architecture decisions we have made before Agentic AI security became mainstream — investing in a governance model that ensures autonomous security actions are always explainable and accountable, and building a continuous operating model that unifies offense and defense rather than treating them as separate programs.
We are proud of this recognition, and even more focused on the outcomes that earned it.
To learn how eSentire can help you find exposures and defend your organization, connect with an eSentire Security Specialist now.
GET STARTEDABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mitangi Parekh Content Marketing Director
As the Content Marketing Director, Mitangi Parekh leads content and social media strategy at eSentire, overseeing the development of security-focused content across multiple marketing channels. She has nearly a decade of experience in marketing, with 8 years specializing in cybersecurity marketing. Throughout her time at eSentire, Mitangi has created multiple thought leadership content programs that drive customer acquisition, expand share of voice to drive market presence, and demonstrate eSentire's security expertise. Mitangi holds dual degrees in Biology (BScH) and English (BAH) from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.