From Isolated Agents to Collective Intelligence: Why A2A Is the Protocol the Agentic SOC Has Been Waiting For
Cisco, Friday, August 28th, 2026
Cisco argues the agentic SOC needs both MCP and A2A, as vertical and horizontal layers of multi-agent security operations.
Cisco opens with a scenario: an alert fires at 2am, a triage agent inside Splunk enriches it in seconds, and then the workflow stops because someone has to open a second tool to trigger the response and a third to create the ticket.
The agent did its job perfectly and the SOC still waited on a human. The post argues that the agentic SOC needs two protocols rather than one. MCP provides the vertical layer connecting an agent to tools and data, while A2A provides the horizontal layer that lets agents hand work to one another.
Without the second, individual agents get faster but the overall workflow still stalls at every boundary.