A security platform provides a single point for security teams to manage the DIR process. Some key features found in secops tools include:

  • Use what you already have better: a security platform should be technology agnostic and allow you to use the security tools that you already have. That could be a SIEM, EDR, or firewall.
  • Bi-directional integration: Uni-directional integration can ingest an alert or extract security artifacts from a tool, but bi-directional integration within the platform to allow you to query and take action through those tools.
  • Apply automation to high-time, low-brain activities such as auto-populating investigation artifacts, configuring response playbooks, and managing the abuse mailbox.

How Does a Security Platform Benefit My Organization?

A security platform underpins SecOps by providing a unified platform that integrates with existing security technologies to improve visibility, reduce complexity, and manage cybersecurity risks across an organization’s attack surface.

The heart of security operations is the threat detection, investigation, and response (DIR) process. You need:

  • tuned and optimized detections that avoid noisy false-positive alerts,
  • rapid investigations accelerated by automation, and
  • streamlined remediation that ideally uses your existing security toolset like endpoint detection and response (EDR) or firewalls.

A Security Platform’s Evolution from Point Solutions

Security operations teams deploy various security tools (EDRs, NTA, SIEMs, PAMs, firewalls, and so forth) to solve different security challenges. These tools improve security protection, but result in tool sprawl challenges for security teams that need to pivot between consoles when investigating alerts and responding to threats. Security teams have also had to become experts in a variety of security tools, whether in tuning that tooling or in digging in to respond to a security incident. The phrase “a jack of all trades is a master of none” comes to mind when considering this fragmented approach.

How a Security Platform Provides High-Fidelity Detection

One challenge for security teams is locating threats without drowning in false-positive and duplicate alerts. A modern security platform should offer an extensive library of curated detection capabilities that can be deployed using your existing technology, enabling you to achieve value within a few hours. Ideally it operates across multi-vendor, multi-cloud, multi-SIEM/EDR security environments to detect malicious behavior or actions. The platform provider should offer accelerated detection capabilities with an extensive library of detections mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework so you can measure detection coverage improvements over time. A security platform’s detection coverage is comprehensive, consistent, and tuned to an individual customer environment. Effective detections evolve over time, and a security platform manages the complete lifecycle necessary to maintain effective detection logic to maximize effectiveness and minimize noise.

Using Automation to Inform Investigation

Security automation can streamline the threat-investigation process by eliminating repetitive or tedious tasks. A platform with analysis capabilities performed by AI automates the investigation and collection of data related to an alert, reducing the manual effort required to respond to alerts. Instead, you and your security teams can focus on mitigating true threats to the organization.

Platforms using AI can automate the collection data relevant to incoming alerts, automatically aggregates artifacts from your various security technologies (SIEM, EDR, etc.), and normalizes the data using a universal query language. Then it should present your team with the top-priority events, allowing them to reach resolution faster.

Responding with Preconfigured Playbooks Through Existing Tools

When you can respond rapidly to threats, you contain the incident blast radius and minimize potential damage. With security platforms you can respond across your entire tool ecosystem, not just a single tool at a time. Once incidents have gone through intelligence analysis by AI, you can respond directly inside the platform, so you can avoid hopping between multiple tool consoles. By executing all actions from a single platform, you achieve consistency and speed in your response, using repeatable playbooks for standardized responses as required.

Measuring SecOps performance: Taking MTTR from Days to Minutes

To improve performance in security operations, you need to measure it. A built in performance index of the platform can provide continuous, board-ready reporting and measurement to track improvements in visibility, tool efficacy, and maturity of your teams and processes.

Analysts can access transparent, easy-to-understand metrics that can help you drive continuous improvement and deliver ROI across your security programs. Your organization should set and monitor a security program roadmap based on each unique environment, technology, and business risk to ensure we are securing what matters most to the business. Then aggregate metrics from across industry and peer sets to provide benchmarks that you can measure your company against.

Taking Security Operations to the Next Level

The DIR process is the cornerstone of security operations and underpins what a security operations platform provides—but keep in mind that it’s one piece of a bigger puzzle. A security operations platform like GreyMatter can help with the rest, including threat hunting, breach and attack simulation, and metrics that allow you to improve operations and communicate your results.

In today’s world, where cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated and frequent, it’s crucial for organizations to invest in platforms like GreyMatter to protect themselves from potential security breaches.