Using security automation and orchestration for SIEM triage

With increasing cyber threats, more organizations are using a variety of tools to monitor and manage security. Security information and event management (SIEM) systems are popular solutions that promise to monitor and alert your security operations (SecOps) team of potential threats.

SIEM Systems Produce Too Many Alerts

The reality is that although SIEM systems deliver on their promise of alerting security teams of all potential risks – they tend to produce too many alerts. As a result, security teams are bombarded with upwards of 150,000 alerts per day of which only 1% are actually investigated.

The problem: Current alert triage and security alert management processes are faulty

Many organizations rely on faulty alert triage methods and alert management processes to determine whether or not a threat should be investigated. This makes many organizations feel like they are on top of managing alerts but SecOps teams could be missing real threats that utilize lesser known cyberattack strategies and thus get lost in the triage process.

Under these current processes:

• It is logistically impossible to review and investigate all alerts.
• Investigation and review processes are inconsistent and unable to change with the ever-evolving threat landscape.
• It’s difficult to integrate all the necessary tools needed to provide alert context, significantly increasing the manual work and time it takes for thorough investigations.
• With informal processes and constant staff turnover, there is loss of critical tribal knowledge with every employee replacement.
• Organizations struggle to stay compliant with the latest regulations.

Every alert that goes uninvestigated could lead to a breach, so what can organizations do to handle the massive volume of alerts? Use security automation and orchestration (SAO) for improved alert triage.

Security automation and orchestration for alert triage

SAO improves alert triage efficiency by automating manual tasks and centralizing alert information into a single platform. Your SecOps team can use these tools to reduce risk, increase threat protection, and easily respond to all of your SIEM alerts.

Improve security operations by automating manual tasks and centralizing operations.

Automate manual, repetitive tasks

As much as 80-90% of the incident response process can be automated, making it possible to address more alerts in the same amount of time with your existing staff. Automating just a few or all of the steps in your alert management process can help save a few minutes for each alert, which significantly increases productivity.

What’s more, with less time spent on manual investigations, employees can focus their efforts on advanced threats, spend time implementing new security strategies and protocols to prevent future attacks, or conduct proactive threat hunting.

Centralize alert information

Disparate tools make it harder to investigate alerts as SecOps employees are forced to switch between tabs and windows to understand what triggered an alert. SAO connects security tools and consolidates data across platforms for better contextual understanding of specific alerts as well as a comprehensive picture of security throughout the organization.

Customizable dashboards allow teams to collect data in the way that optimizes their workflow and addresses their top concerns. They can help monitor the:

• Phishing email box
• Intrusion detection system (IDS)
• Outputs from the SIEM system
• …and more

The Swimlane SAO solution

Swimlane offers a comprehensive SAO solution to significantly improve alert triage processes and incident alert management. Your team can finally take a breath using tools that help them prioritize and manage alerts without compromising security. Swimlane allows organizations to easily:

• Automate time-consuming tasks associated with alert investigation and management.
• Centralize all security operations using real-time dashboards for a more comprehensive view of the state-of-security.
• Standardize, scale, and change processes as your company grows and as cyber threats continue to evolve.
• Optimize threat response and reduce the mean time to resolution (MTTR) with improved threat intelligence.

Swimlane’s security automation and orchestration solution helps increase efficiency by addressing every alert without adding overhead.

Are you ready to improve your alert triage processes using SAO? Schedule a personalized demo.

For more information about the ways you can use Swimlane to improve your security processes download our e-book – 8 Real World Use Cases for Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR).