Cyber security is a world of continuous change. Security operations need to battle attacks constantly to keep your enterprise safe. However, with the rising digitization and amount of data out there the current security solutions are just not enough to handle the growing number of alerts that come their way. You need to invest in additional resources just to be able to cope with this pool of alerts which just ends up increasing your budget to much more than you bargained for.
Many organizations are struggling to afford these exponential costs of security operations teams and processes. Businesses have been adopting Security Orchestration and Automation (SOAR) for a while now to automate a number of manual tasks and save a great deal of time, resources and most important of all reduce their security budget.
Read on to learn more about the leading areas organizations need to invest in their security operations and how SOAR can help optimize your security budget and cut down on these costs.
TOP 3 EXPENSIVE SECURITY OPERATIONS COSTS
The 3 major areas that organizations need to invest in in their security operations are:
- People
- Processes
- Technology
- PEOPLEThe most expensive and complex investment of your security operations is hiring skilled personnel for your security team. With security talent being such a scarce resource, this expense is twice as much for organizations that perform most of their security operations manually. Performing these repetitive security tasks manually will have your SOC analysts sifting through alerts all day. This creates a higher margin of error and may end up in some alerts slipping through the crack which can be a costlier ordeal.
PROCESSES
Processes although a vital part of your security operations can be quite a cumbersome right from the point of setting them up to carrying them out. The amount of time and resources invested in setting up, testing, performing and maintaining each process is tremendous.
TECHNOLOGY
Technology is yet another area of security operations where organizations invest a huge chunk of their resources. We need several tools for a number of purposes such as threat hunting, threat intelligence, analysis and investigation and many more. What we fail to realize is that apart from the initial investment, there is a continuous cost involved in maintaining and upgrading these tools.
All these countless expenses get us thinking…
THE SECURITY BUDGET NEEDS A SECOND THOUGHT
Budget- a word that worries every organisation, big or small. Every investment boils down to one question, ‘is it going to be worth every penny?’
When a SIEM enters an organisation, a bunch of limitations come along. Right from creating false positives, inadequate representation of data, scaling issues, the list can continue to integration challenges and much more. The inability to connect threat intel across platforms is a major drawback with SIEM systems.
Big Data Analytics (BDA) on the other hand not only solves the above mentioned challenges, but also introduces more benefits into your environment. To make the job easier for security teams so that they could focus more on pressing issues, a match of BDA + SOAR is a good investment. It saves time, efforts and empowers your security team to handle next generation attacks.
PROVEN BENEFITS OF BIG DATA ANALYTICS:
Unlimited scaling
Unlimited speed
Ingest unstructured data seamlessly
Data enrichment
Anomaly detection
Security orchestration and automation
PROVEN BENEFITS OF SOAR:
Zero human error
Reduces response time by 60%
Integration of existing tools and processes into a repeatable, automatable workflow
Easy elimination of high-confidence false positive alerts
Accurate decision making
HOW CAN SOAR + BIG DATA CAN REDEFINE YOUR SPENDS ON PEOPLE, PROCESSES AND TECHNOLOGY
SOAR can help you better utilize your security team by automating repetitive manual tasks and freeing up their valuable time to focus on investigation and analysis of threats and reduce handler’s oversight. Thus, leveraging a SOAR solution can reduce your investment in personnel to a great deal.
We saw how creating, testing and maintaining processes can be tedious and wedge a big hole in your pocket. That being said, we cannot do away with processes altogether, after all they are a vital part of your security operations. Orchestration and automation play a role here, all you need to do is define the process once and SOAR will take care of the rest. Orchestration will bring all your tools together and automation will handle all the repetitive tasks, reducing your response time and budget by
In addition to automating your processes, orchestration helps in bringing together your tools and integrates them so they can share and correlate information. This gives you a perfectly integrated solution and reduces the cost eliminates the need to build your own integrations.
Investment in SOAR definitely pays over time. Since you have initiated reading an article on SOAR and now that you are completely aware of its benefits, why not try it? If you have already invested in a SIEM, there is absolutely no need to worry about replacing it. You can involve an automation solution to your existing process and automate specific tasks to start with. Gradually, various processes can be orchestrated from your SOAR platform to experience more benefits. If you still have questions which sound like, ‘Why spend now?’ We would like to leave you with this: Security automation and orchestration in any process driven business is the next step towards evolution. Are you ready to evolve?