Today, organizations are threatened by APTs from multiple vectors and cybersecurity teams need to respond within minutes. On top of this, they are also bombarded with too many alerts and an ever-growing number of security tools. This requires a new layer on top of the SIEM – which resulted in the birth of the SOAR – SOC Automation and Orchestration platforms. Below are some of the way’s SOAR accelerates your SOC efficiency:

Prioritizes Critical and Time Sensitive Alerts

The SANS SOC survey 2019 found that roughly one-third of organizations are swamped by the multitude of alerts and that most analysts are finding the overload tough to cope with. It is almost impossible for security analysts to manually investigate every alert being generated. The right approach to this problem is introducing automation to improve SOC efficiency by automatically prioritizing the critical and time-sensitive incidents.

Helps in Integration of Tools and Thus Effective Monitoring

The SANS 2019 survey found that 43% of SOC managers cited the lack of integrated tools used to build SOC systems makes it hard to create an integrated SOC system that can keep up with vulnerabilities and threats. According to a study by Ovum,73% of organizations use 25+ cybersecurity tools and 9% organizations use 100+ security tools in their SOC. The sheer quantity of tools is enough to overwhelm a security analyst. Additionally, various studies have suggested that more than 50% of the functionalities go unused because of daily operations complexity and ineffectiveness of team capabilities. The right approach to this problem is to build a centralized, integrated tool to streamline the security analyst’s job and make them more efficient at monitoring and eliminating threats.

Helps in automating processes or playbooks

TheSANS 2019 Survey found that 37% of organizations lack processes and playbooks to establish consistent processes. The organizations fail to develop standardized workflows that define how an alert needs to be handled. Most of these tasks are manual including incident prioritization, data collection, documentation and evidence gathering, internal and external reporting and more. The automation of such repetitive and manual tasks reduces processes execution time from hours to minutes or seconds.

Improves Visibility

The SOAR solutions help security analysts with the complete visibility of the cyber campaign delivered as a unified dashboard. Responding from a single screen and centralizing multiple tools into one screen reduces your team’s learning curve. Security Orchestration, automation and response tools help security teams with constant improvement of processes, tasks, and procedures. This is also very important in reducing the workload that leads to burnout from your staff and thereby helping improve SOC team retention.

Improve Key SOC Efficiency Metrics

Implementing the right SOAR platform will enable you to focus on what really matters – mitigating and responding to cyber threats quickly, accurately and effectively. An ideal SOAR solution can help in reduction in MTTR (Mean Time to Respond) up to 90% and the number of incidents resolved per shift might go up by 3x.