RSA NetWitness alerts managed with security automation and orchestration (SAO)

RSA NetWitness is an advanced threat detection and security intelligence platform that combines the functions of traditional SIEM systems with:

• Scalable architecture
• Automated behavior analytics
• The ability to recreate full sessions to understand exactly what occurred
• Real-time and historical analysis
• Easy integration with other security tools

Essentially, it captures and analyzes threat data, which can then be tagged with threat indicators and attributes by working with endpoint data and logs. While these advanced features strengthen security within your organization, unfortunately NetWitness still shares a problem that is common with other SIEM systems – there are just too many alerts.

Too many security alerts

Although RSA’s NetWitness Suite produces too many alerts, this is not a knock on NetWitness. It’s simply the nature of SIEM systems to produce copious amounts of data that need to be investigated. And with all of these alerts, cybersecurity teams can become overwhelmed. In fact, a typical organization receives 10,000 to 15,000 security alerts per day.

Unfortunately, in a typical organization, only about 30 percent of alerts are ever investigated. The rest are ignored – usually due to staffing restrictions. This can become a critical problem as every alert ignored could potentially lead to a major breach.

So, what can you do? Use security automation and orchestration (SAO).

To manage RSA NetWitness alerts effectively, you need security automation and orchestration (SAO). Swimlane’s SAO solution helps you centralize your security data and automate parts of your incident response workflow. You can significantly improve security operations efficiency by providing your team with the tools they need to respond to more alerts in the same amount of time.

Centralized security operations

Security automation and orchestration helps you integrate your security operations (including SIEM alerts) into one dashboard so your team has a clear understanding of your security operations. For example, your security manager can monitor and interpret the outputs of your SIEM, phishing email box, and IDS systems all through one dashboard. By having all data in one location, you have comprehensive context for all of your RSA NetWitness alerts. This allows you to easily handle tasks that require the use of secondary systems and understand how alerts should be prioritized. Centralized dashboards provide your team with a clear overview of the state of security within your organization.

Security automation

Security automation and orchestration allows your team to automate many of the manual and time-consuming tasks that are key to threat investigations. Automation can eliminate many tiresome and tedious tasks allowing your team to quickly remediate a tremendous number of alerts.

Around 80-90 percent of security operations tasks can be automated.

Some processes that can be automated include:

• Responding to data from a variety of security systems (SIEMs, IDSs, EDRs, UEBAs, advanced threat detection tools, sandboxing technologies, etc.)
• Reviewing and analyzing threat intelligence
• Investigating threats through analysis and log gathering
• Documenting processes like updating tickets, creating reports and sending email alerts
• Understanding alert context and taking corrective actions

But I already have my security infrastructure in place…

That’s okay! Swimlane’s solution works in conjunction with RSA NetWitness and your other existing security monitoring tools. All of the time and money you have invested in your infrastructure is preserved. Swimlane’s open API technology simply integrates your systems for complete security intelligence. Once systems are integrated, you can choose to use Swimlane’s centralized dashboard or your own system to manage RSA NetWitness alerts.

Improve security operations with Swimlane

Swimlane’s complete solution helps you:

• Centralize security operations activities
• Capture, standardize, and scale security processes
• Resolve incidents with complete security intelligence
• Automate your defenses with security orchestration
• Deliver metrics for clear oversight and insight into your organization’s security

Want to learn more about how security automation and orchestration can improve your security operations? Download our eBook.

Or, if you think Swimlane might be the right solution for you, contact us to schedule a demo.