Importance of SOC Automation and Integration

 In an ideal world, a security operations centre (SOC) is run by a team of analysts with access to the latest technologies to help ensure that the organisation remains well protected and proactive in defeating cyber threats. In the real world, many SOCs are also facing the challenge of skills shortage. To overcome this challenge, improvement in SOCs has to come through SOC automation and orchestration solutions to help reduce the burden on security personnel and ensure continuous response. Incorporating automation and integration into SOC operations, with a customised workflow that validates the outputs by human intellect creates a right balance and a reliable cyber security function within the organization.

Now multiple MSSPs and enterprises are using automation and integration, which is very beneficial to increase the effectiveness of detecting and responding to threats and undertaking scalable monitoring efforts.

Why is SOC automation and orchestration important?

Reduced Mean Time to Resolve

SOC Automation and Orchestration reduces time needed to resolve security incidents by integrating security tools to streamline processes and make sure that they work together cohesively. After defining these processes, automation helps with the deployment of technology to take care of repetitive and tedious manual tasks.

Context Enrichment

Instead of spending valuable time gathering and sorting through data and reports, with SOC automation and orchestration security teams can quickly detect and respond to an incident through guided case workflow, improved collaboration capabilities and automated collection of contextual information. This enables reduced potential of human error and optimized SOC operations – People, Process, and Technology.

Process Design and Consistency

For all the security events, the consistency and process design is crucial. Orchestration and automation tools speed up the integration of all the functions so that an analyst can easily come up with appropriate workflow (playbooks) that walk security personnel through the process of resolving common incidents and alerts. This helps even most junior analysts work with the same level of proficiency and consistency as senior analysts which have a tremendous positive impact on the time needed to upskill new recruits.

Optimized Threat Intelligence

The best part about automation integration is that it integrates the existing security tools available to get the best results. All the threat intelligence sources are also integrated into it, which drastically reduces the false positives, allowing you to react faster and more intelligently to all types of types of threats.

Quantify Value to Stakeholders

Security tools and personnel are expensive, making it a challenge for organizations to justify the cost to business stakeholders. By collecting information on security operations and generating reports, security orchestration and automation makes it easier to quantify and demonstrate the value of security investments to the business.

Track KPIs

Orchestration also helps track the KPIs which assess team’s effectiveness and demonstrates ROI in security tools, processes and personnel. By centralizing all SOC metrics in one place, analysts can get a better view of how to improve productivity and effectiveness of SOC workflows.

Communication and Documentation

Automated reporting makes life easier by eliminating the need for manually-produced metrics, allowing SOC staff to pull reports on demand. Automation generates weekly/monthly reports so that the efforts can be documented and communicated to the stakeholders in a timely manner.

Leverage SIRP as it supports integration and automation with more than 100 security technologies, including the world’s leading firewall, EDR, vulnerability scanning, antivirus, SIEM, and threat intelligence technologies.

To find out more about how SIRP can empower your security function with automation and integration, book a FREE demo today.