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How do you know if you’re ready for SOAR?

Industry-wide, security operations centers (SOCs) are struggling with overworked, understaffed teams; more alerts than they can handle; and increasingly sophisticated bad actors. Thought leaders agree a breach is not a matter of if but when.

From intellectual property to proprietary information to personally identifiable information (PII), protecting the data of businesses and governments is only getting more crucial and more difficult.

So, with such a dire threat landscape, how do organizations protect themselves or—even better—stop breaches before they happen?

A security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) solution optimizes a SOC’s capabilities by automating time-consuming, tedious incident response tasks while orchestrating the organization’s existing people, processes and technology.

While a SOAR solution is designed to make things easier for a SOC, how do you know if you’re ready for it? Some of our sales and professional services engineers have offered their insights on whether your team is ready for a SOAR solution, steps your team should take to be successful with your SOAR solution, and what to do if you’re not quite there yet.

Three possible reasons you are ready for SOAR

  1. Your team is experiencing alert fatigue with too many alerts coming in and not enough time to triage all of them. With such fatigue comes analyst burnout and turnover, so it’s important to address this issue as soon as possible.
  2. Your current position or team is constantly copying and pasting information and performing other easily repeatable tasks that don’t require a great deal of analysis or critical thinking to solve.
  3. You already have developed diagrams, flow charts and well-defined processes for your incident response.

Five initial steps to take to be successful with a SOAR solution

  1. Decide which defined processes should be automated.
  2. Set goals with clear metrics that map to your KPIs, which the platform will enable you to achieve.
  3. Start small. Look for the quick wins, which typically consist of those mundane, repetitive tasks that can be automated easily in just a few steps.
  4. Select that workflow and then build it out. You will learn the nuances of the system and become more comfortable with it.
  5. Begin to build larger, more complicated playbooks to automate your complex incident response processes.

What to do if you’re not quite there yet

Ready or not, odds are you still have a need for a SOAR solution. Missing key elements such as defined incident response processes can present obstacles, but it’s not insurmountable. The right SOAR vendor should be able you get past that and help you optimize your SOC.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Swimlane (en-US) authored by Sydni Williams-Shaw. Read the original post at: https://swimlane.com/blog/ready-for-soar/