Today’s security teams are flooded with data-driven alerts, most of which are false alarms. Purpose-built incident response tools help cut through the noise to shorten incident detection and resolution times. Look for an IR automation solution with easy-to-build playbooks that your team can use for manual and automated IR processes. This reduces the burden on humans and improves operational maturity.
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Automated Workflows
In many cases, the most valuable component of an incident response platform is its automation. When your team can automate manual processes, they can focus on other critical tasks and minimize the risk of human error. Effective IR and SOAR platforms should allow you to implement playbooks that automatically run across deployed technologies, including on-premise and cloud systems, to provide security teams with the information they need to respond quickly and mitigate threats. These automated workflows can be tested against real-world events before being fully implemented for your enterprise.
A well-designed incident response tool can also help prevent issues from arising in the first place. You can avoid alert storms and prioritize critical incidents by detecting abnormal behavior in your monitoring tools and bringing it into a central location. This type of proactive monitoring should be able to see and prioritize high-value targets, determine the impact on internal users and departments, and identify external factors that may raise or lower the level of risk associated with an incident. By reducing mean time to detection and accelerating resolution times, you can improve MTTD and MTTR, minimize attacker dwell periods, and avoid business disruptions.
Predictive Analytics
A predictive analytics tool scours data sets for patterns and correlations to offer insights that allow users to anticipate problems or make informed decisions. The technology provides many benefits for businesses of all types and sizes.
Adding predictive analytics to incident response platform automation offers a powerful solution for teams using multiple tools to track and respond to threats. It allows analysts to focus on a single task, reduce alert fatigue and triage incidents faster, save time by eliminating manual workflow steps, and improve the quality of investigations and resolutions.
Predictive analytics tools are used by companies in a variety of industries, including healthcare, energy, finance, manufacturing, and retail. For example, a predictive analytics application for the healthcare industry helps identify patients at risk of a severe deterioration in their condition. It can recommend life-saving treatments such as epinephrine injections. Energy companies can use predictive analytics to identify resource needs, mitigate safety and reliability risks, and improve overall performance. For example, a predictive analytics engine analyzes sensor data to predict when power-generating turbines require maintenance.
Automated Notifications
A centralized dashboard is crucial for incident response, as it provides security personnel with the tools to prioritize alerts and optimize their IR efforts. Often, signs are cluttered with false alarms that must be weeded out to focus on the real threats. Automated IR takes this burden off the team, improving their mean-time-to-resolution and preventing threats from going unnoticed.
As a result, this reduces the stress on SOC analysts and helps to alleviate burnout. This is especially important as it allows them to spend less time on routine tasks and more on proactive threat hunting.
During the enactment phase, it’s also imperative that the system works seamlessly with existing workflows and communication platforms. Look for a unified security management platform that automates, integrates, and orchestrates your security tech stack, allowing for two-way communication and collaborative problem-solving.
Finally, be sure to look for a system with reliable performance. No one wants to work with a tool that crashes or doesn’t work consistently, especially when the stakes are high.
Enhanced Collaboration
Modern incident response tools come with automated playbooks that can orchestrate responses to threats across disparate security technologies at machine speed, enabling teams to contain breaches and reduce the impact on employees and customers. Using a single platform for all incident management and resolution stages helps teams focus their efforts, prevents app-hopping (which creates errors), and avoids the time and energy required to perform manual tasks. Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) tools can ingest alerts from various sources, including external threat intelligence and internal data gathered through telemetry. They then prioritize alerts, automate ticketing, sign and notify analysts of new incidents, perform alert triage, and help identify potential root causes of a threat by correlating events from different sources. When choosing an incident response tool, look for one that can adapt to the business’s unique needs and work with existing integrations. This will make incorporating the device into everyday communication workflows easier without adding an extra step. You should also check for reliability, as it’s crucial that your team can count on their tool when they need to be most effective.
Real-Time Information
The speed of response to cyber threats is crucial for protecting data and reputation. However, IT teams are faced with a lot of work and limited resources in the face of the digital infrastructure shift toward the cloud and an ever-increasing attack surface. Automating IR expedites repetitive tasks and eliminates alert fatigue, allowing teams to prioritize and focus on actual incidents.
With the right incident response platform, you can reduce threat detection times and speed up the IR process with built-in incident playbooks that help you get in front of attacks. Automated IR can also help you reduce the time spent investigating false positives, which may bury critical incidents.
The key to a successful cybersecurity strategy is promptly separating actual incidents from false positives, which requires clear communication between all stakeholders. An automated IR process can bring the team together to quickly act on an attack to mitigate risk and avoid costly damage to data and reputation.