For SOC teams, the analytics and automation hype is real

Tools for analytics and automation are providing today’s SOC teams with enhanced visibility, improved productivity, and unlimited scalability—and it couldn’t come at a better time. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, security has become a top priority for nearly all organizations.

With employees being required to work remotely, companies’ data and critical assets are now exposed to more threats as the attack surface has—and continues to—expand dramatically. And SecOps teams are the first line of defense against the data breaches and cyber threats that will undoubtedly become more frequent and more sophisticated as time goes on.

Although many enterprises have slashed budgets due to COVID-19, IT and IT security spending has gone relatively unscathed. In many cases, digital properties now represent companies’ only channel for revenue generation, so investment in the systems that support these properties can’t be cut. SOC analytics and automation, including security monitoring and incident management tools, are now mission-critical apps and services that are required to support revenue generation in today’s changing business landscape.

Let’s take a look at why analytics and automation are so vital for modern security teams, the possible downsides, and why a cloud-native platform is the future for the SOC.

Three core benefits

Nobody could have foreseen the explosion of machine data that the world is witnessing today. As technology continues to weave itself into businesses and peoples’ everyday lives, the volume of data being generated is astronomical. And as more and more data is collected, it becomes invariably more expensive to manage, maintain, and derive insights and value from.

Tools for analytics and automation are key for making sense of this data as it pertains to security, and provide three major benefits:

Visibility

Automation and analytics can provide security analysts with increased visibility into threats across both on-prem and cloud environments. This enhanced visibility helps SOC teams to better manage security alerts and investigate compliance-based risks.

Productivity

The automation of alert triage and threat analysis can help SOC teams achieve higher quality downstream response efforts and faster response times. This results in a jump in productivity, as security analysts can leverage this freed-up time to tackle other high-priority tasks.

Scalability

Organizational needs change just as fast as the threat landscape. Scalable security solutions for automation and analytics provide the resource elasticity to automatically scale data ingestion up or down as demand varies, along with the performance necessary for rapid big data analysis.

Have SOC teams found their silver bullet?

Although SOC analytics and automation provides significant value to security teams, it’s not a silver bullet. Many teams still struggle with alert fatigue, which requires the proper technology and personnel to manage. In fact, a study from Sumo Logic found that 75% of SecOps teams said they needed to hire three or more analysts just to address all the alerts they receive daily. Furthermore, 70% reported the number of security alerts they receive on a daily basis has at least doubled over the past five years.

SecOps teams are routinely drowning in alerts, many of which are false positives and lack the context of both the business and the risk. So, even when alerts are legitimate, analysts have to put in considerable effort to understand the impact that each security event might have. And this high number of alerts will only continue to grow as companies modernize their security stack. Cloud-native security platforms are essential for giving SOC teams more streamlined security insights, so they don’t get lost in a sea of noise.

The magic of cloud-native platforms

According to Gartner, 69% of Board of Directors (BoDs) have accelerated their digital business initiatives as a result of the pandemic. As enterprises of all sizes increasingly accelerate digital transformation and move to the cloud, a new security architecture is required to address the challenges of defending evolving threats.

This modern enterprise security architecture must secure a dynamic, highly distributed, and constantly changing environment that spans remote workers, applications, devices, and cloud-based services and infrastructure. Cloud-native platforms fit the bill by providing SecOps teams with unparalleled security insights and enhanced visibility across hybrid environments, without the overhead of supporting infrastructure.

As the business landscape continues to evolve, and the number of remote workers increases, we can expect to see the adoption rates for cloud SIEM to increase dramatically. The need for a cloud-native security platform that features analytics and automation for improved visibility, productivity, and scalability will become a non-negotiable for ensuring the success of enterprises now, and in the future.