4 Ways To Unleash Speed and Efficiency in the SOC
What does a race car pit crew have in common with a security operations center (SOC)? More than you think. The members of both groups work together on stressful and meticulous tasks that have a major impact on the larger organization. To succeed, they must act as a well-oiled machine running at peak speed and efficiency. Without precise collaboration in which team members understand their roles and responsibilities, they risk failing to deliver on their mission.
In today’s threat landscape, delivering airtight security is mission-critical work. The fastest observed breakout time — the time it takes an adversary to move laterally from an initially compromised host to another host in the victim environment — was only two minutes and seven seconds in 2023. As adversaries accelerate, organizations must operate at the highest level of speed and efficiency to keep up with modern threats.
Legacy SIEMs Hold Security Teams Back
Legacy security information and event management (SIEM) tools are preventing SOC teams from matching adversaries’ speed. A term coined by Gartner 20 years ago, SIEMs were first designed to act as a central hub, pulling together security event data from disparate sources to provide security teams with a unified view of potential threats and malicious activity.
However, these SIEM tools were designed for a time when log volumes and adversary speeds were a fraction of what they are today. Legacy SIEM tools have failed to evolve alongside the growth of data volumes and adversary sophistication, burdening security operations teams with their poor scalability, slow and manual investigations, arduous data ingestion and soaring costs.
Modern security teams are hungry for better SIEM technology that delivers instant time-to-value and increased functionality at a lower total cost of ownership compared to legacy SIEM tools.
Unleashing Your SOC’s Full Potential
A new generation of SIEM (“next-gen SIEM”) has emerged to deliver the outcomes security teams are looking for. Next-gen SIEMs are designed for speed and scale, integrating data, AI and workflow automation within a unified cybersecurity platform to empower security teams to operate faster.
Four Ways You Can Use Next-Gen SIEM to Transform Your SOC and Unleash Your Security Team’s Full Potential:
1. Simplify data ingestion and management for security engineers and architects. Next-gen SIEM transforms data onboarding by bringing key data, such as endpoint, identity and cloud workload data, into a unified cybersecurity platform. With this capability, security engineers no longer need to spend countless cycles onboarding data or dealing with network latency or ingestion bottlenecks, because data flows seamlessly within one platform. With built-in connectors and parsers, next-gen SIEM effortlessly ingests and standardizes third-party data, allowing security architects to focus less on data management and more on security architecture and modernization.
2. Cure security analysts of “swivel chair syndrome.” Next-gen SIEM frees security analysts from pivoting across multiple data sources, tools and consoles, saving time and reducing manual processes. Analysts can quickly analyze threats, identify root causes and take decisive actions. Teams can dramatically accelerate investigations with generative AI automation, intuitive attack visualization and real-time collaboration, all from a single console. Next-gen SIEM helps analysts of all skill levels efficiently triage and investigate incidents, stopping breaches faster than ever.
3. Accelerate threat hunting and response. With search speeds much faster than those of legacy SIEM tools, next-gen SIEM empowers threat hunters and incident responders to swiftly uncover threats and take proactive measures. This technology also equips threat hunters with a robust query language and workflows so they can gain context to identify hidden threats. Deep integration with security products can ensure targeted responses to neutralize threats.
4. Overcome SOC complexity. By consolidating multiple tools into a single platform, next-gen SIEM reduces SOC complexity and administrative overhead. This allows CISOs to focus on strategic initiatives to enhance the organization’s security posture.
Unleashing your SOC team’s potential requires a hard look at your security operations. Ask your team if the SIEM they are using is delivering the outcomes they need or creating barriers to achieving them. As adversaries become faster and more sophisticated, and data volumes grow, your SOC needs greater speed and precision to fight them. With the right tools, your SOC will soon run just like a world-class race car pit crew to deliver on the mission that matters the most: Stopping breaches.
