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ORLANDO, FL, UNITED STATES, October 13, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Ridge IT Cyber today launched Kairos, an artificial intelligence security operations center (AI SOC) designed to investigate alerts at every severity level and share new threat detections across client environments. The fully managed cybersecurity service combines automated investigation with evidence verification and containment controls set by each client.
According to the company, a low-severity alert can remain in a queue while an attacker moves to another system. Ponemon Institute’s 2026 State of SecOps Report, commissioned by Crogl, found that surveyed teams left 63% of daily alerts uninvestigated. The study surveyed 649 IT and IT security practitioners in North America. CrowdStrike’s 2026 Global Threat Report recorded an average eCrime breakout time of 29 minutes in 2025, measuring how quickly attackers moved from an initial compromise to other systems.
Kairos is designed to return an evidence-backed verdict in about three minutes and send isolation commands in under one minute after a threat is confirmed. These figures are platform design targets rather than service-level guarantees, and actual results vary by environment, telemetry coverage and threat type.
Additionally, Kairos collects raw telemetry, including logs and other activity data, from a client’s existing security tools in a data lake operated by Ridge IT Cyber. Investigations can therefore examine the underlying activity, including events that did not trigger an alert.
When an attack is confirmed in one client’s environment, the platform creates a detection for that attack and distributes it across the Kairos client base. It also searches each client’s available historical telemetry for earlier signs of the same activity, with a lookback of up to 12 months. Only de-identified indicators, such as file hashes, IP addresses or behavioral patterns, are shared between organizations. Client telemetry remains separate.
"The arithmetic of the SOC has broken," says Perry Schumacher, Chief Strategy Officer at Ridge IT Cyber. "You can't hire your way out of a queue that leaves nearly two-thirds of alerts untouched. The question isn't whether AI belongs in the SOC. It's whether it can produce verdicts backed by evidence, not just faster noise."
Two AI agents support this process. Phage, the threat-hunting agent, develops detections from threat intelligence and confirmed investigations, then tests them against historical data and simulated attacks before deployment. Leuko, the investigation agent, traces indicators across affected hosts and reconstructs the attack chain.
Kairos requires two models to independently reach the same conclusion. Software then verifies that every cited log exists, and verdicts that fail verification are referred to a human analyst. The AI agents never act directly on client systems. Separate automation carries out containment only within limits each client sets, and anything outside those limits goes to a human for approval.
"We've never taken a dollar of outside capital, so everything we build has to earn its place by what it does for our clients," states Chad Koslow, CEO and co-founder of Ridge IT Cyber. "Security isn't a product you install and forget anymore. It's a continuum. With Kairos, every attack we stop makes the next one harder to land, for every organization on the platform."
The service operates 24 hours a day and integrates with more than 100 security tools. Ridge IT Cyber states that Kairos has no data-ingestion or token fees.
The launch coincides with InfoSec World 2026, which runs Oct. 12–14 in Orlando under the theme “The Cyber Continuum: From Acceleration to Adaptation.” Ridge IT Cyber is providing live Kairos demonstrations at Booth 101 through the close of the show. Kairos was also recently honored in the cybersecurity category of the Tampa Bay Business Journal Inno Awards. Koslow delivered an Oct. 12 keynote on cyber defense in the context of frontier AI, and Schumacher presented “AI Defense: Everyone’s Racing the Wrong Clock” on Tuesday, Oct. 13.
Schumacher also joined Enterprise Security Weekly host Adrian Sanabria for the podcast episode “The Alert Nobody Opened: Investigate Everything, Let the AI Touch Nothing.” In it, he explained why near-frontier open-weight AI will let attackers hide deliberately below the threshold where humans look, and why the answer is neither more analysts nor handing an AI the keys.
For more information about Kairos, visit https://www.ridgeit.com/ai-soc/.
About Ridge IT Cyber
Ridge IT Cyber is a Tampa-based managed security service provider protecting more than 700 organizations and 3.5 million users in 160+ countries. Its services include Zero Trust architecture, AI SOC, managed detection and response, managed endpoint security, CMMC compliance and IT management. The independently funded company has appeared on the Inc. 5000 for four consecutive years and the Inc. Regionals: Southeast list for three consecutive years. Ridge IT Cyber was the highest-ranked managed security service provider on the Inc. 5000 in 2023 and 2024.
According to the company, a low-severity alert can remain in a queue while an attacker moves to another system. Ponemon Institute’s 2026 State of SecOps Report, commissioned by Crogl, found that surveyed teams left 63% of daily alerts uninvestigated. The study surveyed 649 IT and IT security practitioners in North America. CrowdStrike’s 2026 Global Threat Report recorded an average eCrime breakout time of 29 minutes in 2025, measuring how quickly attackers moved from an initial compromise to other systems.
Kairos is designed to return an evidence-backed verdict in about three minutes and send isolation commands in under one minute after a threat is confirmed. These figures are platform design targets rather than service-level guarantees, and actual results vary by environment, telemetry coverage and threat type.
Additionally, Kairos collects raw telemetry, including logs and other activity data, from a client’s existing security tools in a data lake operated by Ridge IT Cyber. Investigations can therefore examine the underlying activity, including events that did not trigger an alert.
When an attack is confirmed in one client’s environment, the platform creates a detection for that attack and distributes it across the Kairos client base. It also searches each client’s available historical telemetry for earlier signs of the same activity, with a lookback of up to 12 months. Only de-identified indicators, such as file hashes, IP addresses or behavioral patterns, are shared between organizations. Client telemetry remains separate.
"The arithmetic of the SOC has broken," says Perry Schumacher, Chief Strategy Officer at Ridge IT Cyber. "You can't hire your way out of a queue that leaves nearly two-thirds of alerts untouched. The question isn't whether AI belongs in the SOC. It's whether it can produce verdicts backed by evidence, not just faster noise."
Two AI agents support this process. Phage, the threat-hunting agent, develops detections from threat intelligence and confirmed investigations, then tests them against historical data and simulated attacks before deployment. Leuko, the investigation agent, traces indicators across affected hosts and reconstructs the attack chain.
Kairos requires two models to independently reach the same conclusion. Software then verifies that every cited log exists, and verdicts that fail verification are referred to a human analyst. The AI agents never act directly on client systems. Separate automation carries out containment only within limits each client sets, and anything outside those limits goes to a human for approval.
"We've never taken a dollar of outside capital, so everything we build has to earn its place by what it does for our clients," states Chad Koslow, CEO and co-founder of Ridge IT Cyber. "Security isn't a product you install and forget anymore. It's a continuum. With Kairos, every attack we stop makes the next one harder to land, for every organization on the platform."
The service operates 24 hours a day and integrates with more than 100 security tools. Ridge IT Cyber states that Kairos has no data-ingestion or token fees.
The launch coincides with InfoSec World 2026, which runs Oct. 12–14 in Orlando under the theme “The Cyber Continuum: From Acceleration to Adaptation.” Ridge IT Cyber is providing live Kairos demonstrations at Booth 101 through the close of the show. Kairos was also recently honored in the cybersecurity category of the Tampa Bay Business Journal Inno Awards. Koslow delivered an Oct. 12 keynote on cyber defense in the context of frontier AI, and Schumacher presented “AI Defense: Everyone’s Racing the Wrong Clock” on Tuesday, Oct. 13.
Schumacher also joined Enterprise Security Weekly host Adrian Sanabria for the podcast episode “The Alert Nobody Opened: Investigate Everything, Let the AI Touch Nothing.” In it, he explained why near-frontier open-weight AI will let attackers hide deliberately below the threshold where humans look, and why the answer is neither more analysts nor handing an AI the keys.
For more information about Kairos, visit https://www.ridgeit.com/ai-soc/.
About Ridge IT Cyber
Ridge IT Cyber is a Tampa-based managed security service provider protecting more than 700 organizations and 3.5 million users in 160+ countries. Its services include Zero Trust architecture, AI SOC, managed detection and response, managed endpoint security, CMMC compliance and IT management. The independently funded company has appeared on the Inc. 5000 for four consecutive years and the Inc. Regionals: Southeast list for three consecutive years. Ridge IT Cyber was the highest-ranked managed security service provider on the Inc. 5000 in 2023 and 2024.
Leigh Bruce
Ridge IT Cyber
lbruce@ridgeit.com
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