Modern cybersecurity teams are being bogged down by a heavy security tax that stems from fragmented tools and restrictive pricing models, putting faster, broader protection out of reach when organizations need it most.

The traditional industry model forces organizations to choose which assets to protect based on cost, rather than risk. But moving toward an integrated approach that prioritizes data visibility and eliminates per-endpoint charges allows businesses to protect their entire digital estate without unsustainable financial commitment, according to Ken Exner (pictured), chief product officer of Elastic. 

“One of the things we’re trying to do is combat that … security tax that people have to have moving between these different systems and trying to provide a more integrated solution,” Exner said. “We want to make sure that pricing or pricing models don’t actually encourage people to follow bad practices.”

Exner spoke to theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Christophe Bertrand at the RSAC 2026 Conference, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed AI-enabled security operations centers and the elimination of the security tax. (* Disclosure below.)

Eliminating the security tax with AI workflows

The evolution of security orchestration, automation and response is moving toward agentic AI, Exner explained. This shift allows for reasoning steps within a workflow, reducing the need for constant human intervention in routine tasks like phishing analysis.

“In the age of AI, where threats are speeding up, you want to combat that with faster actions,” Exner said. “Sometimes using a reasoning step in a workflow can actually speed up that time to actually take action or do something.”

This native integration aims to provide “superpowers” for junior security analysts by grounding AI in the company’s specific data, eliminating hours of manual sifting, Exner said. By using natural language instead of complex query languages, teams can interact with vast amounts of unstructured information more intuitively, he added.

“Any analyst suddenly has all the knowledge at their fingertips for how to resolve something,” Exner said. “In addition to the playbooks and the typical things that might build up as knowledge in an enterprise over time, you have all the industry information about how to deal with these issues.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the RSAC 2026 Conference:

(* Disclosure: Elastic sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Elastic nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE