Remote work requirements, sophisticated attacks, and quickly evolving technology make it difficult for companies to manage IT security while keeping costs down and using overworked staff. Automation is being used more and more by Security Operations Centres (SOCs) to address complexity, enhance the efficiency of processes, and boost the output of their employees.
Routine IT tasks can be automated to increase efficiency, accelerate adoption, and free up employee time for other priorities. For SOCs, automation is an emerging trend. SOC automation aims to improve an organization’s security posture while lightening the load on security analysts and engineers.
Security analysts, who have the knowledge to evaluate attacks and decide what the company should do to address risks, and security engineers, who maintain the tools, continue to conduct the core task of the SOC. The stress and strain on SOC teams is at an all-time high. To retain employees in a competitive labour market, CISOs are placing more and more emphasis on how to improve both job satisfaction and their teams’ capacity to respond to threats.
The report “2022 Cybersecurity Skills Gap” by Fortinet lists SOC analysts as one of the most in-demand positions in cybersecurity. However, security teams have to manually process thousands of notifications each day, which causes a staffing deficit. According to 62 percent of respondents, their cybersecurity teams are understaffed, as per ISACA’s survey report, “State of Cybersecurity 2022: Global Update on Workforce Efforts, Resources and Cyber-operations.”
Security experts are looking for solutions to the workforce concerns, including workflow automation to speed up operations, tools to assist analysts in assessing and addressing threats, and automation of manual security jobs. Here are some advances in SOC automation solutions that can help.
Automated Threat Analysis
Analysts would be ineffective and frustrated manually pursuing thousands of alerts per day, not to mention that it would present a vulnerability that an attacker could exploit. By utilizing machine learning, correlation, threat intelligence, and rules for analysis, modern SOC platforms can automatically ingest and address a larger amount of data from more sources.
Automated threat analysis can boost, sort, and prioritize attack signals while reducing false positives. Delivering the most recent attack leads to analysts enables them to identify and respond to the critical threats rather than getting thousands of them.
Also Read: Five Key Considerations for SOC Modernization
Graph-Based Correlation
The efficiency and ability to respond more quickly can be increased by simplifying attack presentations to analysts. Correlation connects attack points to provide better insight into the attack. Graph-based correlation presents the entire attack story in a format that enables analysts to understand the attack better and respond quickly with greater clarity.
Feedback is Necessary to Improve
Security analysts often lack the time to share what they have learned with the rest of the company due to the massive volume of alerts and alert triage. It takes more than just investing in new technology to make continuous improvements to SOC operations and the security posture of the company. It is necessary to include analyst insights and learnings into the system to share their knowledge throughout the company and use it to enhance SOC operations. This collaboration is made possible by automating repetitive operations and giving analysts more time to understand and respond to attacks.
The Way Forward
Future attacks, the use of increasingly sophisticated techniques by hackers to get past organizational security, and the shortage of analysts all make it unlikely that the future will become less complex. By empowering security teams to focus on detecting and responding to threats, handle volume and complexity, and work to increase business efficiency while reducing costs, SOC automation can enable SOC staff to be true security practitioners.
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