Maintaining visibility and responding to incidents in complex application environments can be time-consuming. Automation allows security teams to increase response efficiency.
Without a single platform that integrates threat information, ticketing and collaboration tools, and pre-built incident response sequences, it can be easy for a team of security analysts to lose track of their tasks during an incident. This wastes time that a resource-strapped SOC can ill afford to lose.
It Saves Time
A well-coordinated response to a threat is essential to minimize damage and downtime. However, it can be difficult for SOC teams to prioritize threats and take action when faced with overwhelming alerts.
Security automation platforms can help speed up incident response by reducing MTTD and MTTR. These platforms contain pre-configured incident response playbooks that automatically orchestrate multiple tools and technologies to detect, investigate, and retain breaches at machine speed. This helps prevent SOCs from missing incidents and attacker dwell times by allowing them to focus on high-risk alerts.
Furthermore, security automation tools can reduce SOC agents’ time on manual processes. For example, a ticket management system can automate ticket generating and filing for all incidents. This allows SOC teams to spend more time resolving tickets, which in turn can improve employee and customer satisfaction.
A low-code security automation tool can also simplify IR and ITSM processes by replacing them with a centralized, automated workflow that eliminates the need for agent-to-agent handoffs.
This can dramatically reduce the time it takes to resolve issues, significantly improving SOC productivity and customer and employee satisfaction. For example, a malware infection can be contained quickly using automated processes that isolate affected systems and implement temporary fixes.
It Saves Money
An automated incident response solution enables you to prioritize, standardize and scale your response processes while minimizing the potential damage a cyber attack can do to your brand. It helps to speed up a response by eliminating manual digital forensics processes and ensures that everyone involved in an incident is engaged correctly.
The solution clearly defines roles, responsibilities, and functions supporting real-time collaboration and unstructured investigation. It can also improve communication by consolidating relevant alerts from all the tools used by your team into a single platform, which automatically notifies teams based on predetermined preferences.
It offers a low-code security automation tool with a centralized dashboard that collates information from all your internal systems and external devices into high-level visual reports for analysts and macro-level management dashboards. By freeing up resources, your SOC team can focus on more pressing and complex issues, like identifying the root cause of incidents so they can be resolved quickly and accurately.
In addition, automated incident response platforms can help reduce the risk of human error that leads to delays and additional costs. A recent report found that companies with a fully-deployed IR program identified breaches 74 days faster than those without one. A rapid and accurate response can reduce costs by preventing lost revenue.
It Gives Your Employees Transparency
Transparency is usually a low priority for tech teams handling incidents, but it should be. With visibility into what tasks are being carried out, who is doing them, and where they stand in their progress, employees can gain valuable time trying to keep track of their work. An excellent automated incident response tool offers improved transparency by letting users check what’s happening and who is working on what.
Automated IR tools allow SOC teams to prioritize alerts, reduce false positives and white noise, and perform basic problem-solving actions automatically. This frees up the time security analysts could spend on low-priority alerts and repetitive tasks to focus on high-risk problems. It also means less work for chronically overworked and understaffed SOCs, improving productivity and reducing staff attrition.
Additionally, an automated incident response platform provides a single source of truth for metrics and events, enabling employees to easily access information with context and collaborate to resolve issues faster.
It also ensures a consistent, uniform response strategy that could satisfy compliance standards. If your IR automation tools are integrated with collaboration and ticketing solutions, employees can get up-to-the-minute status updates by chatting directly on the platform.
This is especially helpful if an employee has questions or needs clarification on what’s being done. But be sure the IR automation tools you use provide flexible controls for granting and revoking access to specific automation, so you can still control how your team works with them.
It Gives Your Organization a Competitive Advantage
An automated incident response platform is a game-changer for any SOC. It eliminates manual processes that take up valuable time and resources, which is especially important when the threat landscape is constantly evolving. It also improves visibility and reduces the number of missed or misidentified incidents, which is a common problem for SOC teams. With fewer false positives, teams can spend more time on real threats and less time wasting on resolving mundane alerts.
Getting the most out of your automated incident response platform requires understanding how it works and how best to use it. An automated IR tool comes with playbooks, essentially scripts for responding to various threats. When an alert is triggered, the system or device initiates the hand and performs the predefined steps.
If you’re looking to buy an automated incident response solution, look for one that can adapt to your business’s future security needs while providing immediate support. This way, you know your investment will be well-spent if the threat landscape changes before you implement it.
