Streamline and Scale Your Enterprise SOC with Automation and Collaboration
Published: June 14, 2016
The ever-persistent threat landscape poses risks to virtually any organization’s operations and bottom line. The question is not if your organization will be attacked, but when. There is clearly a need for smarter security solutions that reduce an Enterprise’s security vulnerabilities and provide a scalable way to defend against attacks when they do happen.
An Enterprise Security Operation Center (SOC) that encompasses people, process and technology is an excellent way for large companies to monitor and respond to attacks, especially when they’re dealing with extremely sensitive information. To be truly effective in reducing threats and respond quickly, enterprises need to implement the right strategy for their SOCs. Automation and collaboration are an extremely important part of the strategy, and we’ll show you how they can help optimize and scale your operations for key SOC functions while keeping your company safe from the many threats in the cyber world.
1. Security Threat Monitoring
One of the key functions of an Enterprise SOC is to continuously review new information, and monitor a complex trove of data which can be extremely difficult for even the most experienced IT professional. Security algorithms are built to be cautious when identifying anomalous data, but it can often mean identifying false positives as well. False positives or not, at most enterprises today, the high volume of alerts surpasses the number of personnel in the team required to handle them, and so a large number of events go uninvestigated.
To help Enterprises cut down on wasted time and hiring unnecessary staff, Demisto has built an intelligent security automation platform — Demisto Enterprise. DBot, the brains behind Demisto Enterprise, can automate the process of prioritizing legitimate threats, monitoring events from various enterprise security solutions for said threats, and determining whether or not a flagged event needs attention from your staff. This greatly reduces false-positives and effort duplication.
2. Security Incident Management
Enterprise SOCs typically implement Incident Response Playbooks as a means for documenting the steps needed to resolve an identified threat or breach. Such playbooks also incorporate the advice of top analysts, and combine years of experience into one actionable document. When your analysts implement the best strategies put forth in the playbook, they help keep your enterprise safe.
To scale the efforts of your security analysts, DBot can read the playbook and execute it on their behalf, so more time in their workflow can be devoted to the tasks that truly require their expertise. Also with Demisto Enterprise the entire process, whether automated playbooks steps or manual completion, is completely documented for legal and compliance reasons.
3. Personnel Recruitment, Retention and Management
Hiring and retaining talent are key to running an effective Enterprise SOC. But many enterprises are unable to find the skilled security analysts they need. An even bigger challenge than hiring is training the new analysts — senior analysts don’t have enough time to train junior analysts. An answer to this challenge is collaboration. Through collaboration, employees can divide the work without being overwhelmed and share knowledge thereby making the existing team better educated and organized. This results in enhanced productivity and can lead to a much better working experience for your best talent.
Using ChatOps as a key component, Demisto, gives employees a means to communicate effectively with each other to facilitate training and ensure there’s less duplicate work being done in a company. DBot is another member of the team that participates in every incident to help with automated data enrichment and response tasks.
4. Process Development, Management and Optimization
Another way to assist with the skillset gap described above is to create playbooks which can help analysts follow a prescribed process to the extent they can. A large number of these actions, however, are completely repetitive and mundane, most of which can be automated. Without proper training, detailed playbooks and processes, you run the risk of confusing employees rather than pointing them in the right direction.
Demisto helps you create the right playbooks and automate execution as much as possible to reduce the risk of costly mistakes. When you choose to make these playbooks trackable, you can also improve upon them as new research becomes available to you.
5. Understanding Enterprise Risk
Cybercriminals do their best to come up with creative solutions around every security measure you’ve created. Their entire goal is to identify one flaw in your whole system and then exploit it as much as possible. Your company is likely a huge target, and there’s little you can do to defend against a brand new technique a criminal has developed to infiltrate your system. However, with intelligent automation and collaboration technology, you will have more time to focus on identifying global trends and patterns to see how your organization may be at risk for the same type of attack and prepare to defend against them. The increased speed of response, thanks to automation and collaboration, will help you build strong defenses against emerging threats.
Done right, automation and collaboration can optimize and scale your SOC operations. Download our whitepaper to learn more about security operations best practices that enhance the security analyst’s productivity and reduce your organization’s risk.
