Security Orchestration | What is Security Orchestration?

As the cyber threat landscape continues to evolve, organizations must put new systems and processes in place to combat threats. Over the last few years, security automation and orchestration has become the front-running solution to help organizations increase security operations efficiency by improving incident response processes.

Most people understand what security automation is, and we have written about it previously, but what about security orchestration?

Orchestration, besides its musical association, is defined as “harmonious organization” or “the planning and coordination of the elements of a situation to produce a desired effect.” That sounds important, but how does this relate to cybersecurity?

In IT security, orchestration involves the connection and integration of a variety of tools and systems to power automation and streamline processes.

What is security orchestration?

Essentially, security orchestration brings together the tools and systems you already have and makes them work together to better serve your organization’s security operations. Leveraging technological integrations with your existing tools in this way allows you to implement sophisticated security defenses using both internal and external resources.

Security orchestration brings together the tools and systems you already have and makes them work together to better serve your organization’s security operations.

Some of the elements of security orchestration include:

• Gathering comprehensive data
• Standardizing processes
• Providing a basis of information to power automation
• Analyzing and improving security playbooks
• Providing security analysts with complete alert context
• Using all available tools and resources together to better defend against threats

Improve security intelligence

Given the increase in data breaches and cyberattacks occurring worldwide, automation is no longer a security suggestion but a necessity. However, enterprises can’t rely solely on security automation. This is because security orchestration makes automation possible.

Orchestration consolidates your tools to improve your organization’s security intelligence. Informed security intelligence improves your operation’s efficiency by using computer automation where it works and human decision-making when necessary.

Increase security operations efficiency

Security orchestration also makes automation more powerful as dashboards, reports and human collaboration combine to increase the overall efficiency of your security analysts.

Enhance context

By centralizing operations into a single interface, SecOps teams better understand the state of security throughout the organization. Orchestration enhances context and enables better and faster decision making by bringing information together. Organizations may also reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) by enabling analysts to view breaches and threats occurring in real time. The ability to quickly catch and shut down attacks can stop data breaches in their tracks before they impact the organization.

Centralizing security data makes it easier for your SecOps team to understand threats and protect your organization.

Automation supported by orchestration can also be used to perform rote tasks like comparing files to signatures of known threats, reviewing previous incidents, etc. Having a better understanding of where threats are coming from and how they are intruding helps your team better prepare for and defend against threats.

Handle More Alerts with Your Existing Staff

Security operations efficiency improves with automation supported by orchestration. SecOps teams can eliminate tedious and manual tasks to finally be able to handle all of their security alerts. Nearly 90% of all security operations incident response tasks can be automated to some extent. Every step automated in the investigation process allows your team to handle more alerts and reduce MTTR.

80 to 90 percent of all security operations incident response tasks can be automated to some extent.

Unfortunately, no matter how hard we try, it is impossible to rely on a solely automated solution. Human intervention is necessary to investigate and understand new threats, so they can be added to automated processes in the future. Replacing your team with a fully-automated solution isn’t possible, but security orchestration can extend the abilities of your existing team.

Reduce Management Complexity

Increasingly, enterprises need an intricate network of tools and systems to handle and manage advanced threats. Gone are the days where organizations rely on one security solution, but instead SecOps teams must now handle multiple security vendors and numerous security touchpoints.

Orchestration works with your existing security infrastructure to make managing security operations a breeze, regardless of how many systems or vendors you use. Plus, coordinating your tools actually increases their value by allowing you to leverage all of their capabilities.

Security orchestration works with your existing security infrastructure to simplify SecOps management.

How Swimlane Can Help: Security Orchestration & Automation

Swimlane uses security orchestration and automation together to improve incident response processes through streamlined workflows and prioritized alert management. Our solution works in conjunction with your existing security infrastructure and provides security teams with:

• Centralized dashboards: API-first architecture makes the integration of all of your security systems simple. Your SecOps team now has context for all alerts generated across systems and a comprehensive view of the state of security within your organization.
• Incident response automation: After system integrations have been set up, organizations can automate many of the manual and time-consuming tasks that slow down incident response. Every automated step makes it possible to address more alerts, in the same amount of time, with your existing staff.

These tools make it possible for your team to:

• Centralize security operations
• Reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR)
• Standardize and scale processes
• Deliver insightful security metrics
• Have real-time oversight
• Do more with your existing staff.

Use security orchestration and automation to improve security operations, reduce security risks, and protect your organization.

Do you want to learn more about how security orchestration and automation can improve your security operations? Download our eBook Automating Incident Response. Think the Swimlane solution is right for your organization? Contact us today to schedule a demo.