Securing the agentic frontier: telemetry, trust and machine-speed defence in the public sector
Guest blog by Linda Wales, Regional Sales Manager for Home Office & Law Enforcement at Splunk part of Cisco #AISecurity
Executive summary:
The transition from assistive Generative AI (GenAI) chatbots to autonomous, goal-driven Agentic AI represents the most significant shift in enterprise technology since cloud migration. Unlike passive models, agentic systems possess agency: they decompose complex objectives, execute multi-step tool calls, access databases, and make real-time decisions without continuous human intervention.
For critical public infrastructure, policing, and central government, this autonomy unlocks transformative productivity. It also fundamentally rewires the threat landscape across three critical dimensions.
1. Countering autonomous adversaries: defence at machine speed
The Challenge: Cyber adversaries are rapidly weaponising agentic frameworks to conduct autonomous reconnaissance, discover unknown zero-days, coordinate polymorphic attacks, and chain exploits across identity boundaries at speeds impossible for manual human analysis to match.
The Splunk/Cisco Response: Defending against autonomous threats requires continuous, end-to-end data fidelity. Siloed alerts must be replaced by unified streaming telemetry connecting endpoint, network, and cloud environments (Cisco Security + Splunk Enterprise Security), establishing dynamic behavioural baselines that detect and isolate malicious agentic choreography before impact.
2. The internal frontier: governing and securing deployed agents
The Challenge: As organisations deploy AI agents to handle sensitive workflows, they introduce non-human identities with broad privileges. Risks include prompt injection, indirect context contamination, unauthorised lateral tool execution, and unmonitored data exfiltration.
The Splunk/Cisco Response: You cannot secure what you cannot observe. AI agents must be integrated into standard enterprise observability and security architectures. Splunk enables end-to-end logging and telemetry of model inputs, API transactions, decision trees, and downstream actions. This enforces Zero Trust least-privilege principles and verifiable audit trails for AI workloads.
3. Transforming the SOC: the AI-empowered cyber defender
The Challenge: Public sector and commercial Security Operations Centres (SOCs) face chronic skills shortages and alert fatigue, creating asymmetric advantage for attackers.
The Splunk/Cisco Response: By deploying agentic AI defensively using Splunk AI Assistant and Agentic Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) (Automation Builder), defenders regain the upper hand. Autonomous agents handle rapid triage, alert correlation, and contextual enrichment in seconds, freeing cyber analysts to focus on complex threat hunting and high-level decision making with human-in-the-loop oversight.
Summary and techUK call to action:
Achieving true digital resilience in the AI era requires a holistic strategy: observing every interaction, governing every autonomous identity, and augmenting human expertise with machine-speed defence.
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Meet the team
Jill Broom
Head of Cyber Resilience, techUK
Jill leads the techUK Cyber Resilience programme, having originally joined techUK in October 2020 as a Programme Manager for the Cyber and Central Government programmes. She is responsible for managing techUK's work across the cyber security ecosystem, bringing industry together with key stakeholders across the public and private sectors. Jill also provides the industry secretariat for the Cyber Growth Partnership, the industry and government conduit for supporting the growth of the sector. A key focus of her work is to strengthen the public–private partnership across cyber to support further development of UK cyber security and resilience policy.
Before joining techUK, Jill worked as a Senior Caseworker for an MP, advocating for local communities, businesses and individuals, so she is particularly committed to techUK’s vision of harnessing the power of technology to improve people’s lives. Jill is also an experienced editorial professional and has delivered copyediting and writing services for public-body and SME clients as well as publishers.
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Website:
- www.techuk.org/
- LinkedIn:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jill-broom-19aa824
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Annie Collings
Senior Programme Manager, Cyber Resilience, techUK
Annie is the Programme Manager for Cyber Resilience at techUK. She first joined as the Programme Manager for Cyber Security and Central Government in September 2023.
In her role, Annie supports the Cyber Security SME Forum, engaging regularly with key government and industry stakeholders to advance the growth and development of SMEs in the cyber sector. Annie also coordinates events, engages with policy makers and represents techUK at a number of cyber security events.
Before joining techUK, Annie was an Account Manager at a specialist healthcare agency, where she provided public affairs support to a wide range of medical technology clients. She also gained experience as an intern in both an MP’s constituency office and with the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed. Annie holds a degree in International Relations from Nottingham Trent University.
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Twitter:
- anniecollings24
- LinkedIn:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/annie-collings-270150158/
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Olivia Staples
Junior Programme Manager - Cyber Resilience, techUK
Olivia Staples joined techUK in May 2025 as a Junior Programme Manager in the Cyber Resilience team.
She supports the programs mission to promote cyber resilience by engaging key commercial and government stakeholders to shape the cyber resilience policy towards increased security and industry growth. Olivia assists in member engagement, event facilitation and communications support.
Before joining techUK, Olivia gained experience in research, advocacy, and strategic communications across several international organisations. At the Munich Security Conference, she supported stakeholder engagement and contributed to strategic communications. She also worked closely with local and national government stakeholders in Spain and Italy, where she was involved in policy monitoring and advocacy for both public and private sector clients.
Olivia holds an MSc in Political Science (Comparative Politics and Conflict Studies) from the London School of Economics (LSE) and a BA in Spanish and Latin American Studies from University College London (UCL).
Outside of tech, Olivia enjoys volunteering with local charities and learning Norwegian.
- Email:
- [email protected]
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Authors
Linda Wales
Regional Sales Manager for Home Office & Law Enforcement, Splunk part of Cisco
