The growing threat landscape poses significant challenges to security operations. Attackers are getting more sophisticated, exploiting a wide range of vulnerabilities, devices, and entry points. As a result, the increasing volume and complexity of security alerts have made it impractical for security teams to rely solely on manual effort to investigate and respond to them.

Within security operation centers (SOCs), analysts spend a substantial amount of time and effort on these manual processes such as log analysis, event correlation, and incident investigation. Unfortunately, this manual approach hinders their ability to swiftly detect and respond to security incidents. It also introduces inconsistencies in incident response, as different analysts may interpret and handle events differently. The growing volume and complexity of security events can overwhelm analysts, often leading to burnout. To address these challenges, automation has become a necessary solution.

How Does SOC Automation Improve Efficiency?

SOC automation involves the implementation of automated operations within a SOC to replace manual workflows, streamlining processes and delivering notifications promptly. For example, with event collection and alert generation, data is collected from multiple sources, integrated, and filtered based on predefined rules. Automated analysis identifies patterns and anomalies, generating alerts when specific events or thresholds are met. By automating tasks such as these, security teams can achieve the overall key benefits of SOC automation, including:

  • Enhanced efficiency and speed: Automation eliminates the need for repetitive and time-consuming manual tasks. By streamlining processes, it allows analysts to focus on more critical and complex activities. This improves operational efficiency and accelerates response times to security incidents.
  • Improved accuracy and consistency: By using predefined rules and workflows, automation minimizes human error, leading to more accurate analysis and investigation and reducing mistakes and inconsistencies. Automation also ensures standardized incident response, reducing variations in decision-making and response strategies.
  • Increased scalability: As security threats continue to evolve and increase in volume, automation enables security operations teams to handle larger workloads and scale their operations effectively.
  • Enhanced threat detection: Automation improves threat detection by continuously monitoring and analyzing security events. It can detect overlooked anomalies and trends, allowing for early detection of potential security incidents and enhancing overall threat detection capabilities.
  • Reduced burnout: Automation relieves analysts of high-time, low-brain tasks, reducing the likelihood of burnout and enabling analysts to apply their skills where they matter most.

What Are Some Specific Use Cases for Automation?

To enhance security operations, it’s important to identify the most suitable automation use cases. By doing so, analysts can successfully implement automation in key areas, improving response efforts and strengthening the overall security posture of an organization. Below, we’ve listed out our top five recommended use cases for SOC automation:

1. Threat detection: Automatically deploying detections across an environment can protect from potential threats or vulnerabilities. For example, deploying detections to endpoint detection and response (EDR) technology allows for detection of attacks such as malware and ransomware, fileless attacks, suspicious processes, anomalous network traffic, data exfiltration, and insider threats.

2. Alert triage: Automation streamlines alert triaging by enabling real-time analysis, classification, and prioritization of alerts, eliminating false positives, and allowing analysts to focus on genuine threats. It ensures consistency, scales operations efficiently, integrates with security tools for context, and reduces alert fatigue.

3. Analysis: SOC automation streamlines data aggregation, correlation, and normalization, freeing up analysts to focus on containment and remediation. For example, applying automation to phishing email analysis can help categorize suspicious emails, reducing analyst workload. It quickly analyzes email headers, links, and attachments to identify potential phishing attempts and alerts the security team promptly.

4. Threat hunting: Security teams can utilize automated processes for data collection, enrichment, and performing queries using specialized threat hunting packages. These automated techniques enable security teams to quickly gather relevant data, enhance its context, and execute targeted queries for efficient threat detection and response.

5. Response actions: Security teams can develop automated response actions, such as blocking an IP, banning a hash, or deleting a potentially harmful phishing emails rather than logging into the separate tools to do it manually. These automated responses can be further optimized by configuring them to trigger based on predefined conditions to expedite response times.

What Is the Role of AI in SOC Automation?

While some may use the terms automation and AI interchangeably, it’s important to recognize that AI extends beyond automation and offers complementary advantages. For example, AI plays a supporting role in collecting behavioral analytics, anomaly detection, data summarization, and decision-making for alerts.

Behavioral analytics involves AI analyzing patterns and gaining insights into human and system behavior. By utilizing machine learning algorithms, AI continuously learns and adapts to evolving patterns of normal behavior, enabling the identification of suspicious activities and anomalies.

AI can assist with anomaly detection by processing large volumes of data and identifying deviations from expected behavior, including previously unknown or zero-day threats.

AI also excels in data summarization by extracting relevant information from extensive datasets. This capability empowers security teams to focus on critical areas without being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data. By providing insights and recommendations for alert prioritization, AI assists in decision-making, reducing alert fatigue for security analysts.

Will Automation and AI Replace Analysts?

The collaborative approach between AI, automation, and human interaction ensures that human expertise remains paramount while also being enhanced. Rather than replacing human analysts, the integration of AI and automation aims to complement their capabilities, enabling them to concentrate on higher-priority tasks.

Should SOAR Solutions Be Used for SOC Automation?

SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response) tools are commonly used to achieve automation through a proprietary technology stack (security information and event management [SIEM] tools, EDR, email security, etc.). SOAR tools integrate data and streamline operations between tools in an environment.

Building and maintaining automation workflows is where SOAR solutions typically fall short. Security teams must carefully plan, design, and integrate systems and tools to meet an organization’s specific needs. Ongoing efforts are required to monitor, troubleshoot, and update the workflows as threats evolve and new technologies emerge. Unfortunately, this can divert security teams’ efforts towards maintaining the SOAR solution instead of focusing on other important tasks.

How Can a Security Operations Platform Help?

Here’s where a security operations platform can make a difference. A comprehensive security operations platform provides a holistic approach to security operations, integrating with various security tools and systems. It offers a central hub that not only facilitates automation but also provides capabilities for threat detection, incident response, collaboration, and reporting.

By utilizing a security operations platform, security teams can leverage automation capabilities without being overly burdened by the maintenance and upkeep. They can rely on the platform to handle the complexities of integrating and orchestrating different technologies and systems, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks.

Why ReliaQuest GreyMatter for SOC Automation?

By leveraging a comprehensive platform that integrates seamlessly with your existing technologies, you can elevate your detection and response capabilities while relieving your team from repetitive and time-consuming security tasks. The ReliaQuest GreyMatter security operations platform uses cutting edge automation and technologies to collect and translate data from your existing endpoint, network, and cloud security stack, no matter where those tools live. It pairs data collection and analysis technology with powerful automation, driving better overall SOC efficiency to better respond to threats and mitigate risks. Request a personalized GreyMatter demo to discover how we can help strengthen your security posture.