Appeared in cioandleader.com | 28 March 2022 By Rajarshi Bhattacharyya, Chairman and Managing Director
With cyber-attacks getting more sophisticated, it is quite critical for the security operations team to have a deep knowledge of the tactics, techniques, and procedures used by cybercriminals.
Security Operations are increasingly getting very complex due to the multi-cloud environments, remote working culture, and explosion of devices at the edge.
The performance of security analysts at the organization’s Security Operations Centre (SOC) is frequently impacted by the alert fatigue factor. Being accountable for handling huge volumes of threats daily, analysts face the ordeal of differentiating between real threats and false positives, which negatively impacts their productivity. To add to this drop inefficiency, there is also a lack of cybersecurity talent, making matters worse with an appalling number of errors made by analysts. This is exactly where the Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) technologies can make a huge difference. Just from a single platform, SOAR can power security operations to improve an organization’s overall security posture, by understanding, deciding, and acting on security incidents and improving the scalability of the systems as well. Automation can address the shortage of analysts and other inconsistencies.
The business benefits delivered by the SOAR platform are many, leading to an acceleration in its adoption in SOCs.
Consistency and Efficiency in Security Processes
Sometimes numerous security tools, like the firewalls, threat intelligence platforms, Security Information and Incident Management (SIEM) tools, among others, may not be interoperable causing delays. It is here, the SOAR platform plays the role of integrating them along with other IT operations tools and delivering an actionable summary, thereby saving time for analysts to focus on critical issues.
SOAR technologies are also useful in integrating external threat intelligence with internal security data collection and analysis and automating basic remediation tasks too. This way, the analysts can organize and correlate data easily, and eliminate the usage of solutions and devices from different vendors, which often have challenges in working together. The automation aspect of the tool eliminates error due to the human factor, providing much-needed consistency in the operations.
Quick and Automated Response
SOAR technology stack, which is configured to respond to threats automatically under different circumstances, will address any security incident in a much shorter time than when done manually. In the latter case, other signals of the threat have to be displayed causing delays, which may even lead to data theft. With SOAR, the infected endpoint or device will get automatically quarantined from the network, or an IP address on the firewall will get blocked, dramatically decreasing the response time of SOC, and reducing the burden of the security team.
SOAR platform supports the security teams in reducing the meantime to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) to minutes, as compared to days or months taken if done manually.
Scalability in Security Operations
It is evident, with the growth of the organization, the IT infrastructure and networks get more complicated and security teams will be flooded with high volumes of alerts daily. With this expanding threat landscape, it is equally important for the SOC to have a security solution that grows too. SOAR’s easy-to-scale platform delivers quicker threat detection and response besides automating low-level alerts, enabling organizations to scale their security operations. Investments for additional manpower, hardware, or infrastructure will be eliminated, thereby reducing costs.
Drives decision making intelligently
With cyber-attacks getting more sophisticated, it is quite critical for the security operations team to have a deep knowledge of the tactics, techniques, and procedures used by cybercriminals. The team members should be able to detect the vulnerabilities and compromises that exist as well, to efficiently deal with the threats. It is the various data collected, analyzed, and validated from different sources, such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, threat intelligence platforms, and other security tools that help to make critical security-related decisions. The SOAR platform automates this entire process to enable intelligence-driven decisions to be taken by the security team while accelerating the process of incident detection and response.
SOAR solution undoubtedly improves the efficiency of the SOC by automating processes, scaling security operations, and ensuring intelligent decision-making, besides optimizing overall costs.
