Director for Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ) and Middle East (ME), Securonix
Cybercriminals are getting faster and smarter, while IT and security operations are becoming more cumbersome. On top of a dramatic increase in data usage and the growing complexity of IT environments, cybercriminals are getting more aggressive with their tactics.
While next-generation security information and event management (SIEM) solutions are proficient at sniffing out complex threats, enterprises today have started to lean toward security orchestration, automation and response; or SOAR in short, to automate activity and orchestrate actions across the security team to resolve threats.
That having said, disparate SIEM and SOAR solutions are limited in their effectiveness. Therefore, there is a need for organisations to scale their automation and orchestration capabilities so that they can empower their security analysts to investigate and respond faster.
When machine speed attacks like ransomware can enact final attack stages in seconds, the stakes to respond are high.
Standalone SOAR solutions struggle to improve the mean time to respond (MTTR) due to a lack of necessary event data related to alerts. This requires security analysts to toggle between multiple interfaces and perform repetitive tasks to investigate and respond to the threats.
On the other hand, tightly integrated SOAR capabilities within the core security analytics platform can help simplify the user experience and streamline the end-to-end incident response cycle.
Streamline investigation and response
When SOAR capabilities are a seamless extension of SIEM, security analysts can significantly drive down their MTTR and free up their resources to focus on mission-critical tasks.
Having good security operations centre (SOC) ergonomics and taking an analyst-centric approach to security is essential for enterprises today. Natively integrated SIEM and SOAR solutions that are designed to simplify an analyst’s experience and well-being will always yield better results than bolted-on solutions.
Giving analysts the ability to collaborate, investigate and respond without context switching not only allows the organisation to drive down its MTTR, but also empowers the rest of the security team to focus on high-risk threats versus mundane tasks.
Automate response at machine speed
When an alert comes through, a security analyst is tasked with manually searching for additional context across threat intelligence, identity repositories and asset management sources.
SOAR automatically gathers key evidence and artifacts from multiple tools and sources so that security analysts can investigate alerts within a single console. This automation should happen at machine speed so as to enable the organisation to respond to threats more efficiently from the moment they are detected.
Respond to threats at scale
SIEM and SOAR solutions are only as good as the data they collect, making architecture massively important for fast detection and response.
Tightly integrated cloud solutions help avoid duplicative data resources. When the SIEM and SOAR are not properly connected, it may increase data requirements which in turn can increase costs. A well-architected, cloud-native SOAR embedded into the SIEM is the most effective way for modern enterprises to meet both security and data demands.
Along with offering high configurability, cloud-based SIEM and SOAR solutions deliver nearly unlimited scale and faster velocity than on-premises or bolted-on solutions.
Solutions that are developed for, and run in, the cloud allow organisations to provision and deprovision resources as needed. Not to mention the time security teams save when they do not have to focus on managing infrastructure.