SOC Automation: More Secure for Less Cost

Your SOC is on the front line of defending your organization from cyber attacks and they are drowning in a wave of thousands of alerts every single day. This is a serious problem:

• Inducing high stress and dissatisfaction for analysts which in turn drives employee turnover and hiring costs
• Tieing up all of the analysts time which stops them from proactively hunting and improving your security posture
• Drives a dramatic increase in the impact of incidents by alerts being closed without investigation or not being triaged properly. 

You may even be tempted to reduce data coming into the SOC to try and get event counts under control. What could be lurking in that data that's now going nowhere? So you want to optimise your SOC….

If you’d like to hear more about how Cado security can help to automate your SOC processes, please reach out for a demo or read our playbook on Automating Incident Response.

Before optimization

An example of a typical ticket with limited information given to the SOC analyst

After optimization 

Example of a ticket which has been automatically enriched by Cado Response

You’ve already had an alert, don’t wait for the analyst to capture the data they need

Your analyst is having to take the same steps over and over, checking information in multiple sources and having to bring in additional data before they can even begin triaging a ticket.

By automatically acquiring and processing all the data related to an alert as part of ticket creation, you can dramatically streamline the triage process and allow tickets to be closed or escalated much more quickly.

This allows the analyst to spend more time doing interesting and essential triage rather than mundane tasks and drives down key metrics such as Mean Time to Respond, and Mean Time to Resolution, which reduces potential business impact

Now you’ve got the data, set the analyst up for success

Now that you’re automatically acquiring the data the analyst needs, you can automate the processing and enrichment of that data and feed it back into your ticketing platform.

The analyst starts with analysis rather than shipping data around and jumping through hoops. Feeding back into the ticket gives the analyst a fully contextualised view of what has happened in and around the event of interest. This alone can massively improve the time to resolve a ticket and let you do more with less. By processing the additional data the analyst gains a much wider context of the event and enables faster and more confident decision making, driving efficiency in their role as the first line of defence. Where a ticket should be escalated, the escalation happens much faster which reduces the blast radius of an incident.

Need to escalate? Use tools where the SOC and response teams can work together

If an event is triaged and identified as a true positive by the SOC and the incident response team is required you can reduce the handover friction by using tools where both the SOC analyst and the IR expert can both confidently investigate. If an IR team needs to pick up an incident they will walk into a situation where the first data they’d want is already on hand, enriched and summarised. If processing and enriching additional data confirms an event needs escalated automatically, you have effectively freed the level 1 analyst of that ticket and allowed them to spend time adding value elsewhere e.g., hunting for unknown threats to your environment.

How does an optimised SOC uplift security posture?

Very rarely do security teams lament the excess of resources and skills they have available to them. By optimising your SOC you can enable your teams to spend time doing proactive tasks which uplift your security posture rather than being on the back foot fighting an infeasibly long queue of event tickets, any of which could be a serious incident unfolding. Tasks such as threat hunting, tuning detection rules and staff training are now unlocked and provide even further levels of optimisation to reduce the likelihood that you experience impact from an incident.

Hold the line against threats by putting your SOC in the best position by automating the repeatable processes. Provide context and summaries up front for analysts, rather than waste their time doing the same things over and over (....and over…) again before they can even think about triaging the hundreds of alerts that day.

At Cado we are optimising the SOC and response teams by leveraging our native detection platform integrations and our industry leading data acquisition capabilities across cloud, on-premise, and SaaS domains to provide unparalleled response pace and visibility into attacks.

If you’d like to hear more about how Cado security can help to automate your SOC processes, please reach out for a demo or read our playbook on Automating Incident Response.