Not many things keep company executives and heads of federal agencies up at night like mega cyber breaches do. Mega cyber breaches are not only on the rise, but are also becoming increasingly costly to treat. IBM found that a mega-breach can cost an organization anywhere between $40 to a whopping $350 million.
There are two variables contributing to mega breaches, and these variables are spread among most organizations.
The only realistic assumption, as these technologies become more advanced and prevalent, is that the security methods that support these technologies are just as sophisticated.
The dark side or 4IR
Cloud computing and IoT are two of the Fourth Industrial Revolution's main powers. The former provides flexibility, smooth integration, a dynamic environment for development, while the latter creates a world that is more connected than many would have ever imagined.
These capabilities, however, render companies more vulnerable to mega hacks, as hackers have more access points and digital infrastructure vulnerabilities.
Across the globe, we are more aware than ever now of how hackers can circumvent cloud authentication. And yet most cybersecurity solutions do not provide a sufficient degree of automation to respond to all of the potential threats in the most efficient way possible.
SOARing Ahead
By 2023, the demand for incident response is expected to grow to $33.76 billion, from $13.38 billion in 2018. Some remedies are more effective than others.
For organizations to respond to security incidents more efficiently, SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response) provides the most comprehensive solution.
SOAR technology enables enterprises to respond to many threats without human interference by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and drawing on vast volumes of data.
Here’s what makes SOAR security such an effective approach to cybersecurity:
Streamlined Ecosystem
On an average, organizations have 50 resources available to handle their security infrastructure. It forces analysts to track several instruments simultaneously on an ongoing basis, with controls functioning independently of each other. It produces unequal response mechanisms, including instances in which response times are widely varying, and in the worst of situations, absolute chaos.
SOAR tools allow businesses to incorporate their entire security infrastructure into a single platform. This way, in a defensive plan, elements are able to interact and work together. This not only means greater network visibility, but also means fewer and more cybersecurity-related strategic alerts.
Orchestration and Automation
Threats to cybersecurity come in different forms, some more nuanced than others. SOAR's strategy is to recognize all threats and to automate as many of them as possible.
Email phishing is a classic example. While many systems require an analyst to flag potentially threatening messages manually during a phishing attempt, a SOAR cybersecurity allows organizations to flag potentially nefarious messages automatically without human effort.
Strategic and Actionable Insights
SOAR solutions give a leg up, except for events that can not be completely automated. SOAR platforms not only provide companies with actionable insights when an event happens through ML algorithms, but also help locate individual workers in an organization who have faced similar challenges and solved them. The efficiency that’s created through these capabilities could mean a difference of tens of millions of dollars when a mega breach occurs.
Leaner and Smarter Cyber Security Teams
The cybersecurity talent shortage has been described as a "crisis," which is "getting worse." A SOAR cybersecurity strategy encourages analysts to work smarter, allowing them to spend their resources on projects that need more analytical energy and imagination. This implies that companies can do more with fewer resources, and the lack of cybersecurity expertise immediately becomes a non-issue.
Analysts are empowered on a SOAR product with a comprehensive workspace and a range of instruments that can help them decide on strategies for remediation and escalation.
No organization is impervious to the challenges posed by cloud computing and IoT, whether private, public or otherwise. The longer it takes for a company to respond to a mega breach, the more dire the financial effects of the breach.
Both stakeholders are responsible for implementing security approaches that are just as mature as the technologies they represent. etting more instruments, more dashboards, and more alarms ultimately do not make a security strategy more effective.
Automated alert triage
It has become increasingly difficult for analysts to keep up with the speed of incoming warnings due to lengthy incident management procedures.
In one location, SOAR automation aggregates these warnings while enriching them with added meaning to improve resolution time. It also helps decrease the amount of "false-positive" warnings and advanced case management features that help identify, direct and speed up investigations.
SOAR orchestration streamlines common SOC tasks such as warning ingestion, severity level-based prioritization, task assignment, and subroutines.
More complex exchange-to-exchange (E2E) activities, such as triage, enrichment, inquiry, and remediation, are also automated cohesively.
This is done by automatically correlating warnings from around a security stack into a single incident, centralizing the security processes.
These advanced capabilities of integration and automation help alleviate many of the common burdens associated with warning fatigue.
In turn, SOC analysts should concentrate on threat hunting, thus reducing workloads and exposure to an active threat of a breach.
Augmenting the SOC to Accelerate Incident Response
The presence of multiple manual workflows impedes warning investigations and increases the time needed for resolution while raising the likelihood of human errors and oversights. Organizations are not necessarily operationally inefficient in this situation; they are just at increased risk of infringement.
The remedy is to increase the SOC by leveraging SOAR technology to improve the logging and reporting automation functionality and the security information and event management (SIEM) solutions. This results in rigorous orchestration and automation of all SOC processes and an increase in overall security.
Security teams can improve productivity by automating, changing, or upgrading every job according to the needs of the organization.
SOAR software solutions can automate a single agency, increase the entire SOC and improve overall security.
SOAR security tool is extraordinarily customizable. Any response and subroutine can be automated by security teams. They can even set threshold conditions under which SOAR can take an offline identity and exploit its built-in playbooks and connectors to achieve the optimum response to an incident.
Conclusion
SPORACT by Anlyz gathers information for organizations from various sources, helps them understand the data, and optimizes security processes, while providing an automated response. The analytical capabilities of SPORACT allow security operations teams to track, evaluate and terminate threats. Data insights allow the team to understand the current cybersecurity environment through threat categories.
Overall, SPORACT helps CISOs and leadership teams develop better strategies for holistic security incident response management around entities, processes and technology. You can check out SPORACT’s features here.
