5 Ways Security Orchestration, Automation and Response makes your cybersecurity team efficient

Today, organizations are threatened by advanced and persistent attacks from multiple vectors and cybersecurity teams need to respond within minutes. On top of this, they are also bombarded with too many alerts and a labyrinth of security tools. This requires a new layer on top of the SIEM – which has resulted in the birth of the SOC Automation and Orchestration platforms.

Below are some of the way’s in which Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) makes your cybersecurity team more efficient

Prioritizes Critical and Time-sensitive Alerts: The SANS SOC survey 2019 found that roughly one-third organizations are swamped by the multitude of alerts that most of the analysts find hard to cope with. It is almost impossible for security analysts to manually investigate every alert being generated. The right approach to this problem is introducing an automated SOC that will be able to prioritize the critical and time-sensitive incidents.

Helps in Integration of Tools and Thus Effective Monitoring: The SANS 2019 survey found that 43% of SOC managers expressed the lack of integrated tools used to build SOC systems. This makes it hard to create an integrated SOC system that can keep up with modern vulnerabilities and threats.

According to a study by Ovum, 73% of organizations use over 25 cybersecurity tools and 9% organizations use even more than 100 security tools. The sheer quantity of tools is enough to overwhelm a security analyst. Additionally, various studies have suggested that more than 50% of the functionalities go unused because of daily operations, complexity involved, and nonoptimal utilization of team capabilities. The right approach to this problem is to build a centralized, integrated toolset to streamline the security analyst’s job and make cybersecurity professionals more efficient at monitoring and eliminating threats.

Helps in automating processes or playbooks: The SANS 2019 Survey also found that 37% of organizations lack processes and playbooks to establish consistent processes. The organizations fail to develop standardized workflows that define how an alert needs to be handled. Most of these tasks are manual including incident prioritization, data collection, documentation and evidence gathering, internal and external reporting and more. The automation of such repetitive and manual tasks reduces a process’s execution time from hours down to minutes and even seconds.

Improves Visibility: The SOAR solutions further help security analysts to gain complete visibility of a cyber campaign in a unified dashboard. Responding from a single screen and centralizing multiple tools into one screen reduces your team’s learning curve. Security Orchestration, Automation and Response tools also help security teams to bring constant improvements within processes, tasks, and procedures. This is also very important in reducing workload from your SOC team and eventually helps in retaining talent.

Reduction in Key Metrics: By implementing the right SOAR platform you will be able to focus on what really matters – responding to and mitigating cyber threats quickly, accurately, and effectively. An ideal SOAR solution can help in reduction in MTTR (Mean Time to Respond) by up to 90%. The number of incidents resolved per shift might as well go up by 3x.

By Rakesh Kharwal, Managing Director, India/South Asia & ASEAN, Cyberbit