Modern security operations (SecOps) face ongoing challenges: tool management, overwhelming volume of alerts, fragmented workflows, and staff shortages. These challenges are further compounded by the evolution of the threat landscape. As bad actors adopt AI and automation to scale their attacks, security teams struggle to respond fast enough to mitigate the impact. To address these challenges, security operations must adopt automation as part of their defense strategy.

With this growing need for automation, organizations must explore solutions that address their most critical use cases. This blog highlights how to define those use cases, scale SecOps automation, and align specific technologies with organizational goals. By following this approach, organizations and security teams can maximize the accessibility of automation, ensuring they stay ahead of modern security challenges.

Common Automation Use Cases

To effectively benefit from automation, organizations must first identify which aspects of their security operations are most suitable for it. Below are some common use case categories that organizations often look to automate.

Ticketing Workflow Automations

Ticketing workflows involve the systematic handling of incidents from detection to resolution. This process includes ticket creation, assignment, progress tracking, and ensuring proper documentation and reporting. Manual ticketing and incident management involve steps requiring human intervention and coordination, lengthening the whole process and impacting threat dwell time. Automating this process may include:

  • Generating a ticket with all the necessary details of a detected threat.
  • Sending non-critical alerts to the security operations center for triage, while critical alerts are sent directly to incident response teams for analysis and remediation.
  • Updating ticket statuses as the incident progresses.

Threat Detection, Investigation, and Response Automation

Threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR) is a critical area for automation. Applying automation to this process directly impacts alert volume and reduces the speed and effort of responding to threats and mitigating risk. Unlike ticketing workflow automations,  this use case is centered around the actual actions taken for the tickets across the TDIR process itself:

  • Alert validation and deduplication: Security operations teams face an overwhelming volume of security alerts generated by various technologies, including SIEM, EDR, firewall, email security tools, and MDRs/MSSPs. Each alert requires a thorough review to determine its validity and relevance. Manually processing these alerts is labor-intensive and prone to human error, which can lead to missed threats, redundant efforts, and alert fatigue.
  • Investigation enrichment: Manually navigating various security tools and threat intelligence to enrich investigations significantly prolongs mean time to contain (MTTC). Aggregating, correlating, and analyzing data from disparate sources and threat intelligence not only consumes valuable time, but also heightens the risk of human error, such as overlooking important information or inconsistencies.
  • Response actions: Manually navigating each security tool for containment delays response times, increasing mean time to resolve (MTTR). This delay provides adversaries with more dwell time to move laterally within systems, increasing the risk of a successful attack.

Business Process Automation

Business process automations, which sometimes go beyond the scope of just incident handling, often address repetitive steps and coordination across various departments and systems. These automations may include offboarding employees, scheduled maintenance, and change management approvals. on the type of workflow, the steps can vary. For example, manually offboarding employees can include:

  • Revoking access to various systems
  • Collecting company assets
  • Updating internal records

Automating Threat Detection, Investigation, and Response with ReliaQuest GreyMatter, a Security Operations Platform

ReliaQuest GreyMatter is the only technology-agnostic security operations platform, which ensures unmatched compatibility with any customer’s unique technology stack. It emphasizes modularity and interoperability, allowing customer the flexibility to add and remove tools as their business needs change.

GreyMatter is ideal for automating the TDIR process. It provides a comprehensive library of detection rules that automatically trigger alerts for containment actions; then, once a threat is detected and contained, an AI-driven investigation begins, utilizing data from across existing security solutions for analysis. Remediation actions can then be deployed, either initiated by an analyst, or automatically through the platform. Through GreyMatter, security operations teams can achieve:

  • Optionality and modularity: With over 150+ supported data sources your team can automate workflows across any tool you own, without the fear of automated workflows breaking when vendors change APIs, log formats etc.

For example, log source format changes in the storage solution—like a SIEM or data lake—can impact many TDIR automations that rely on that data, requiring adjustments and testing.

  • Reduced alert noise: Leverages automations, increasing alert fidelity with Indicator of compromise (IoC) enrichment and alert deduplication.
  • Enhanced context: Automates alert enrichment using over 40 threat intelligence sources, all correlated with AI to provide analysts with immediate, actionable insights to accelerate investigations. Through these capabilities, GreyMatter customers have achieved MTTC of 5 minutes or less.
  • Automated responses: Provides out-of-the-box, prebuilt containment responses like blocking an IP, resetting user credentials, and more.
  • Optimized resources: GreyMatter APIs and playbooks—continuously updated and maintained through the platform—help to deduplicate and enrich alerts, unburdening security teams by eliminating the need for manual review.

With GreyMatter, the process of integrating technologies is abstracted, simplifying alert enrichment and executing response playbooks. This means no more learning query languages, retesting, revalidating, or extensive development. GreyMatter streamlines these tasks, allowing security teams to focus on efficiently protecting the organization from threats.

Extending Automation with SOAR

After identifying and automating relevant TDIR use cases, an organization must then consider the automation of ticketing workflows and business processes. Security operations teams frequently turn to SOAR solutions to automate those cross-functional elements of SecOp processes.

This extensive configurability of SOAR solutions, while beneficial for certain tasks like ticketing and workflow automation, does place an additional administrative burden on teams. If the use cases of ticketing and business process workflows are important to an organization, then a SOAR solution integrated with a Security Operations platform would be the next phase of their automation journey. However, for organizations that want to only automate TDIR workflows, a security operations platform can help deliver fast, easy, and consistent automation outcomes.

Conclusion

With demand for automation higher than ever, identifying the relevant use cases is the first step for organizations. Doing so helps determine which automation solution will best fit their needs. While SOARs are often considered, organizations can achieve automation without relying solely on them, particularly when it comes to TDIR automation workflows. The ReliaQuest GreyMatter security operations platform can deliver quick automation outcomes to reduce the strain on security teams, ensuring they stay ahead of modern security challenges.