Security orchestration, automation and response solutions provide flexibility, support and collaboration. Look for vendors that will tailor workflows to your requirements while offering ease-of-use integration capabilities with full documentation support.
Security orchestration systems process alerts from different technologies and consolidate and correlate the information. Furthermore, they create automated procedures to speed up responses to threats that require swift action from all involved.
Streamlined Incident Response
Security orchestration brings together and unifies key SOC processes--such as alert triage, analytics, incident response and threat hunting--on one platform to streamline and automate these activities for teams so they can focus more strategically on tasks requiring experienced analysts' skillsets.
To maximize the benefits of security orchestration solutions, choose a platform with easy integrations between existing tools and solutions, with plugins supporting standard technologies. It should also allow easy connection and integration of external systems via built-in or custom APIs - such as vulnerability scanners, endpoint protection products, firewalls, IDSes/IPSes or threat intelligence feeds.
Security orchestration solutions should quickly ingest and consolidate alert data from various tools, enabling SOC teams to apply context quickly. Furthermore, an efficient solution should quickly generate and prioritize automated responses for specific incidents, thus decreasing mean time to detection (MTTD) and remediation time (MTTR) and decreasing impactful attacks against internal systems and businesses.
Under 1 per cent of security alerts ever get investigated due to manual triaging being time-consuming and labour-intensive for teams. Sifting through information gathered about an incident from multiple tools can be time-consuming, with security orchestration makes this task simpler by collating alert data from all platforms into one central case that can then be investigated on security orchestration platforms.
IOC enrichment involves adding tags to indicators like URLs, IPS hashes, IP addresses and DNS records; performing checks for malicious intent; turning over an incident to an analyst for further investigation and action; updating databases; closing cases - all completed through one simple user interface with one click! This ensures faster and more effective responses to threats while decreasing manual steps involved with incident responses.
Deeper Incident Investigations
Security orchestration automates processes and procedures that involve manual, human-based handling of security incidents. Automated actions, known as playbooks, are created based on established incident response workflows detailing investigation and response protocols. Security orchestration solutions may combine security automation and incident response automation with security information and event management (SIEM), user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA), and firewalls as specialized workflow solutions that allow security teams to process alerts faster while increasing incident handling capabilities.
Businesses face numerous threats daily that can generate a steady flow of alerts that can quickly overwhelm SOC analysts, leading them to experience "alert fatigue". SIEMs can collect and analyze all this data, but it takes analysts time to organize and prioritize it properly.
Cyberattacks can quickly progress and negatively impact a business's bottom line, creating alert fatigue among analysts. SOAR provides relief by automating routine work to ease alert fatigue while freeing them up for more critical tasks.
As soon as an alarm is triggered, the centralized dashboard can display a list of incidents to be handled, along with which priority incidents require attention first. This helps SOC staff manage their workload effectively while protecting overburdened analysts from being overwhelmed by low-priority issues.
SOAR reduces paperwork requirements and can enhance communication among different teams within an organization by creating standard operating procedures for responding to incidents and remediation efforts. Increased analyst productivity may allow more threats to be addressed at any given time.
SOAR goes beyond traditional SIEM solutions by connecting various tools within a company's cybersecurity toolkit to create a holistic response to incidents without human involvement. By collecting data from various systems and initiating automated actions with customizable scripts for responses, SOAR helps minimize cybersecurity attack dwell time, mitigate damage, and minimize business impact.
Improved Collaboration
Security orchestration makes various tools and solutions work together seamlessly, ensuring they communicate easily and can share information intuitively. By eliminating manual data transfer between tools, security orchestration allows teams to maximize all their value as tools are utilized optimally.
This process is essential because it allows analysts to provide faster responses. Furthermore, they gain greater insights into what's happening within their environment, so they can prioritize tasks and respond more efficiently when threats or vulnerabilities are present. Furthermore, it helps reduce mean-time-to-remediate (MTTR), the time taken for an incident to be resolved once detected by your team.
As was noted before, security analysts can become overwhelmed with alerts generated by various tools, leading to alert fatigue. This often results in false positives or the inability to spot real threats. Security orchestration helps address this problem by unifying all internal and external tools while consolidating data so analysts can easily get actionable results.
Results in an effective and efficient SOC. By automating lower-level threats, analysts can spend more time identifying and responding to real threats with the full support of their organization's defenses.
As well as streamlining operations, security orchestration can improve team member collaboration. It can standardize processes and simplify for analysts of all tiers, managers, C-suite executives, IT and other business stakeholders to work together efficiently. A security orchestration solution with a central dashboard and user-friendly UI facilitates information-sharing across disparate teams or departments.
Security orchestration platforms offer one such example of this approach by unifying SIEM platforms with endpoint protection solutions, firewalls, IDSes/IPSes and third-party threat intelligence feeds to create an integrated environment where these systems can communicate and share information efficiently - eliminating the need to switch between individual tools to analyze data or gather context. It can also reduce incident prioritization timeframes by automating playbooks designed to take the guesswork out of handling incidents, helping your team quickly address attacks before they significantly affect business operations.
Better Integrations
Integrating security tools within the framework of a SOAR solution is crucial to improving the efficiency of any Security Operations Center (SOC). SOAR solutions employ integrated integrations and application programming interfaces to gather data from an array of internal and external systems, such as vulnerability scanners, endpoint protection products, user and entity behaviour analytics, firewalls, intrusion detection/intrusion prevention (ID/IPS), network monitoring systems, security information and event management (SIEM) platforms and SIEM platforms - to name just some examples. Aggregating such data provides a greater probability of threat detection while creating a full context and improving collaboration among SOC analysts.
Once alerts are reviewed and consolidated, security orchestration automates response functions to free up SOC analysts for more in-depth investigations of complex threats. Furthermore, SOAR platforms' central interface and single point of contact for prioritizing and responding to incidents enable more accurate risk evaluation and swifter reactions to critical incidents.
Security orchestration also offers SOC teams a way to strengthen their talent pool by relieving mundane, repetitive tasks from their workload and freeing analysts to use their skills more strategically - ultimately increasing the overall value of an organization's cybersecurity defences.SOAR solutions can assist SOC analysts in cutting through the noise of an ever-increasing volume of alerts. Context is of utmost importance for any SOC analyst. The best SOAR tools provide that with ease by pulling from multiple sources to form a holistic picture of an attack or potential threat - eliminating manual triaging that is limited, tedious, and leaves room for human error, freeing analysts up for more meaningful and complex tasks with reduced mean-time-to-remediate rates.
