Endpoint protection: How to improve endpoint security with SOAR

Endpoint security often comes to mind first when people think about protecting their organization from hackers and cyberattacks. It involves ensuring that all possible points of entry into critical systems, applications or physical devices are protected from unwanted visitors who wreak havoc on the larger network. However, endpoint protection is more than just installing anti-virus software or implementing two-factor authentication, as it provides organizations with a way to centrally manage all endpoints regardless of geographical location.

Endpoint security – ensures that all possible points of entry into critical systems, applications, and physical devices are secure to protect the larger organization’s entire network.

The problem: Lots of endpoints = lots of alerts

Within a single organization, there can be hundreds to thousands of endpoints. Each endpoint can generate numerous alarms tied to potential threats. Manually executing high-volume endpoint actions or investigating each alarm can be time-consuming and ineffective.

Many organizations rely on faulty alert triage and alert management processes to determine whether a threat should be investigated. These processes make organizations feel like they are on top of their endpoint security but the reality is that every uninvestigated alert could lead to a breach. What’s more, each step involved in these processes slows down mean time to resolution (MTTR), which may lead to greater risk.

How does an organization address every endpoint alert and improve endpoint security? By utilizing a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform.

The solution: Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR)

Security orchestration, automation, and response platforms help organizations improve endpoint protection and the entirety of an enterprise’s security by using:

• Security Automation: The use of automation rules, playbooks and workflows to detect, prevent and respond to cyberattacks. It can be used to automate time-consuming and manual investigation tasks.
• Orchestration: This brings together all of your existing security tools and processes to better serve overall security operations. Security orchestration also helps centralize all critical security data into a centralized dashboard for a better understanding of the security landscape.
• Incident Response: All of the processes an organization uses to resolve security alerts. Responding to every alert can be tedious but incident response processes enable security teams to triage alarms more effectively and respond to critical events much faster.

Altogether, SOAR speeds up MTTR and helps organizations centralize security data for a more comprehensive view of their security landscape.

Endpoint protection and SOAR

SOAR can automate the remediation process for endpoint security-related alerts by triggering appropriate actions without any need for human intervention.

For example, if an endpoint security alert comes into the SOAR platform, the data is enriched using external threat intelligence sources like a CMDB or the process may query an EDR tool for additional contexts. From there, it can determine whether it is a known bad or a new security threat. Then the system can complete predetermined endpoint detection and response processes including finding all affected hosts, isolating them and killing processes to sending notifications and opening tickets with IT to reimage hosts.

Using security orchestration, automation and response ensures that all endpoint security-related alerts are addressed. Response and remediation actions are taken in real time, helping prevent incidents from escalating into full-fledged security breaches.

Swimlane’s comprehensive SOAR platform

Swimlane offers a comprehensive SOAR solution that can significantly improve endpoint protection and overall endpoint security across your entire organization. It automates time-intensive manual tasks and optimizes operational workflows for improved protection. Real-time dashboards provide powerful and consolidated analytics so your security team can understand the state of security within your organization while proactively planning and protecting against future attacks.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Swimlane (en-US) authored by Ellyn Kirtley. Read the original post at: https://swimlane.com/blog/endpoint-protection/