As any security professional can attest, it takes a lot of resources and a lot of staff to secure hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Today, the typical organization uses anywhere from 41 to 60 different security tools distributed across up to 10 different vendors.
This proliferation of tools creates many challenges for security operations teams. Whenever an incident is detected, analysts must navigate through multiple solution areas and correlate different alerts to understand what happened and which parts of their environment were affected. It is difficult to convey the specialized knowledge required to perform this task, so analysts often have to communicate with multiple team members in the process – ultimately slowing down the threat detection and remediation process.
To better protect hybrid and multi-cloud environments, organizations need an integrated security operations center (SOC) solution that combines extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities with security information and event management (SIEM) for effective and contextual threat protection.
Key differentiators of the next generation integrated SOC solution
At its core, an integrated SOC solution empowers security operations teams to overcome the fragmentation of existing tools by integrating and contextualizing alerts within a single pane of glass view. This leads to better incident detection, analysis, and response because teams don’t have to spend time correlating information and investigating threats. Instead, they can view all related information within a unified platform and focus their efforts on effective troubleshooting and repair. A next-generation integrated SOC solution leverages this advantage in several key ways.
First, connecting XDR and SIEM is critical to creating a complete and accurate picture of security incidents. Traditionally, SIEM collects signals generated by users, applications, servers, devices and infrastructure—whether on-premises or in the cloud. By correlating and making this information the basis of an integrated XDR engine, organizations can deepen their understanding of attacks. So instead of knowing that an attacker has compromised a user’s identity with a phishing email, security teams can get more context such as which applications the compromised identity has accessed or what data it has shared with. This allows analysts to quickly understand what corrective actions need to take place.
Second, advanced integrated SOC solutions can place automation capabilities on top of these XDR correlations for automated attack disruptions. Alerted by high-fidelity signals, automated attack disruption allows an integrated SOC solution to disrupt attacks on behalf of security analysts before they even reach the SIEM. This reduces the mean time to repair and improves SOC efficiency by preventing attackers from spreading into your environment. Automated attack disruption goes beyond security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) because it relies on threat intelligence and advanced AI models to withstand the rigors of advanced attacks. SOAR can also be integrated as part of an integrated SOC solution, but requires security teams to create their own automated response actions.
Third, advanced integrated SOC solutions are embedded with manufacturing AI. This allows teams to further accelerate investigations with automated incident summaries, malicious code analysis, and step-by-step guided next steps.
Finally, the last (and perhaps most important) difference is in the communication capabilities of the SOC platform. An integrated SOC solution loses its value if it requires additional licensing or requires security teams to put in a lot of effort to connect devices. Instead, these connections should be available as out-of-the-box integrations that analysts can easily enable to start gaining immediate value from the platform.
Streamline workflows with an integrated SOC platform
Ultimately, the true value of an integrated SOC solution lies in its ability to simplify workflows so that security teams can respond effectively and efficiently to incoming attacks. And while features such as automatic attack disruption and alert communication are important in enabling this benefit, there is also a human element to the matter.
An integrated next-generation SOC solution frees security teams to spend their time focusing on complex problems that require human intelligence and creativity. Rather than sending multiple specialized analysts to investigate an alert, a unified SOC platform can bring cross-device visibility within a single pane of glass view. This overcomes the data silos that exist between different tools, enabling connections that human defenders might miss and freeing up analysts’ time to deliver value in other areas of the business.
It depends Read more about overcoming device fragmentation for improved threat protection, explore Microsoft’s integrated SOC solution and sign up for our upcoming webinar on the next generation of security operations.
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