SOAR: Not Just a Buzzword, the Key to MSSP Success
At this point, every company must be concerned for the security of their data. Cyber criminals are constantly coming up with new ways to exploit networks, leveraging advanced technology and systems to do so. In fact, cyber criminals have begun to use automation to carry out attacks at machine speeds that are more effective at circumventing security controls.
Even as organizations become more aware of cyber risks, many do not have the infrastructure in place in terms of the team members, processes and tools required to combat these advanced threats. As such, organizations are turning to managed security service providers (MSSPs) to help them fill in the gaps and protect their networks.
This presents a large opportunity for MSSPs to provide value to their customers and grow their business. However, they must go beyond the traditional expectations of a managed service provider that offers onboarding, asset management and incident monitoring.
Rather, successful visionary MSSPs must leverage SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response) to keep pace with modern attacks throughout deployment, mitigation and triage.
What Is SOAR?
Security orchestration, automation and response, SOAR, refers to the use of various compatible solutions to enable automated incident response with minimized false positives. Effective SOAR allows IT teams to reduce the resources and level of human intervention required to respond to security incidents through comprehensive analysis of baseline network functions. With this understanding of normal baseline behavior, security tools leverage artificial intelligence to determine when there is anomalous behavior on the network and automatically respond to the threat–reducing dwell time and breach potential.
While some think of SOAR as overhyped and too similar to SIEM platforms, for MSSPs, SOAR will be an integral part of creating value for customers. With SOAR, MSSPs will assist customers by reducing security complexity, assimilating massive amounts of network and threat data, and developing and managing people, processes and services.
Your Customers Have a Big Data Problem
The first key step to SOAR is security orchestration, the goal of which is to aggregate and correlate data from various sources to establish a baseline for secure network behavior. However, this is easier said than done. In order to establish a baseline, your customers’ IT teams and analysts must sort through massive quantities of information.
Analytics engines are collecting an ever-growing library of threat intelligence, from every device, individual and action performed across the network. Unstructured data surrounding events then needs to be linked from across disparate systems and processed in near-real time in order to minimize threat efficacy.
Furthermore, as threats evolve, data science teams will have to update the algorithms used to correlate and classify all of this data to determine what is normal behavior and what is potentially threatening.
Overall, this demands too many resources in terms of time and manpower, where neglecting to act quickly can leave your customers vulnerable.
- Page 1
- Page 2