How SOAR Solves the Cybersecurity Skills Gap Problem?
There’s no denying that securing today’s digital ecosystem—which consists of systems, networks, and data—against sophisticated cyberattacks has become tougher than ever. With cybercriminals constantly upping their tactics, organizations cannot afford to lose the battle against incoming cyber threats that only leave behind a trail of damage. Consequently, the whole burden of detecting, investigating, analyzing, and responding to cyber threats and incidents falls on the shoulder of the SOC teams. But there’s a catch to it.
SOCs Suffer due to Talent Crunch
Building a fully functional SOC team is not a simple feat. The team should have the right people onboard who can assist in threat monitoring, threat intelligence management, alert management, incident analysis, threat hunting, intrusion detection, and incident response processes. The team members not only have to be skilled and highly trained, but they should also be capable of seeing the big picture and be prepared with remediation, particularly when faced with an active threat. Moreover, as organizations expand their corporate networks to hybrid-remote operations in the post-pandemic world, the need for qualified cybersecurity professionals with a wider range of skills has become a necessity more than ever. However, that’s easier said than done, and attracting eligible professionals is likely too far out of reach in the current cybersecurity skills shortage scenario. As per the world’s largest nonprofit association of certified cybersecurity professionals, (ISC)², there’s a shortage of 2.7 million skilled cybersecurity professionals worldwide. This means that the SOC leaders need to scrutinize the existing pool of available talent in the market and hire ideal prospects while keeping the job requirements as well as the organization’s budget in mind. Not to mention, this hiring process adds to the existing burden on SOC leaders who are also responsible for managing their team members as well as overseeing the smooth and effective implementation of security operations on a daily basis.
With the prevailing talent crunch in the market, most of the SOC teams invariably find themselves understaffed to deal with the changing cyber threat landscape Security teams are stretched too thin while they struggle to sift through a never-ending barrage of alerts and log data daily to identify and respond to threats that could be dangerous. These repetitive and time-consuming tasks carried out on a daily basis cause analyst fatigue and burnout among the security teams, which also increases the chance of missing out on critical threats. But, the bigger picture is organizations can lose millions if a threat is not detected and mitigated in time.
According to ‘The Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022’ by Ponemon Institute and IBM Security, it takes an average of 207 days to identify a data breach and another average time of 70 days to contain it. In a situation, especially when understaffed security teams are already suffering from burnout and alert fatigue due to a sheer volume of threat alerts, the resolution timeline to respond to a threat can go for a toss and have a catastrophic impact on an organization. Moreover, because of the workforce shortage, the security teams are left with less time to focus on more important tasks associated with defending networks and systems.
How does SOAR Solve the Talent Crunch Problem?
The problems of talent crunch and labor shortage faced by SOCs need a solution, and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) promises to be just that. SOAR revolutionizes the overall SOC processes by bridging the gap for understaffed security teams while improving their productivity. With SOAR, organizations can automate threat intelligence sharing, hunting, response, and other security operations in an end-to-end manner, eliminating manual efforts required to perform these processes Here’s a look at how it delivers a better security operation:
SOAR Automates Daily Mundane Tasks
A modern-day SOAR platform helps automate a lot of mundane tasks usually undertaken by SOCs, thereby enabling leaner security teams with capabilities to focus and prioritize other tasks that need immediate attention. While security orchestration helps collect data from disparate sources, security automation assists in the execution of responses and actions to alerts and incidents by using automated playbooks. This ensures that security operations and processes are handled more efficiently and organizations can bolster their productivity and capacity to address more incidents without hiring more security personnel. By automating mundane, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks, SOAR also eliminates fatigue and lets the analyst do more in less time.
SOAR Allows You to Do More with Less
Scalable security automation is the need of the hour. With the changing needs of security teams, a cost-effective vendor-agnostic SOAR platform helps an organization build automated, cross-functional workflows that can orchestrate security and response actions across cloud-based, on-premise, or hybrid infrastructure. With a vendor-agnostic SOAR platform, organizations can seamlessly integrate disparate deployed security tools and technologies, without having to worry about data orchestration issues. This enables the SecOps team to gain a holistic view of the cybersecurity environment and accelerate their threat response actions. Nowadays, organizations have started adopting low code security automation platforms to automate security operations. This empowers security teams of all sizes to quickly build their customized workflows with little knowledge of coding skills.
SOAR Improves ROI
A comprehensive SOAR platform also helps realize better return on investment (ROI) as it improves scalability and efficiency of security workflows by automating and streamlining the detection, investigation, analysis, and actioning of threats while significantly reducing the scope of human error. Modern SOAR platforms improve the visibility and productivity of security teams by centralizing the entire detection, analysis, and response workflow from a single console. In a way, the team gets rid of tedious and disjointed manual workflows involving different security tools. As diverse incidents and threats are managed on a single platform, SOAR improves threat management in security teams by removing false positives and noise and connects the dots between external threat intelligence, internal threat intelligence, and suspicious incidents to proactively identify, triage, and mitigate threats. By remediating security threats in real-time, SOAR helps organizations to reduce both Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) and the overall dwell time of an attack.
The Bottom Line
In today’s world where organizations are rapidly embracing digital transformation and migrating applications to the cloud, it is imperative that threats are mitigated across various environments at a faster speed without hampering business operations. SOAR fulfills these needs and improves the productivity of SOC teams by orchestrating the flow of threat data and automating workflows across all security tools and technologies whether deployed in the cloud or on-premise environments. Overall, SOAR facilitates security teams to be more proactive in preventing attacks against their organizations by orchestrating data from a wide range of tools including cloud security, forensics, malware analysis, vulnerability and risk management, data enrichment, threat intelligence, incident response, and endpoint security and analyzing them at a central point thus facilitating a high threat visibility-driven response with granular control. This prevents security teams from juggling between different consoles and tools while providing a comprehensive view of the threat landscape on a single dashboard. With security orchestration and automation, security teams are free of several mundane responsibilities, which in turn gives them more time to prioritize other tasks effectively.
Moreover, agility, collaboration, and reactivity are of paramount importance as threats in the cyber landscape evolve at an increasingly rapid pace. To meet these qualities and reap maximum benefits, SOAR now comes as an integrated module with cyber fusion center platforms. A SOAR platform powered by cyber fusion eliminates the silos in response operations by unifying multiple teams and security functions associated with threat intelligence, security automation, threat response, security orchestration, incident response, and others under one roof. With advanced security orchestration and security automation capabilities of a cyber fusion, security teams can move beyond mere incident management and proactively respond to all kinds of threats including malware, vulnerabilities, and threat actors.
Beat cybersecurity talent crunch challenge by automating security workflows using Cyware’s industry-leading, decoupled SOAR solution. Book a demo to know more!
