Are too many SIEM alerts overwhelming your staff? Use SAO.

3 Minute Read

SIEM platforms are a great way to protect your organization from cyberattacks. They promise to monitor and alert your SecOps team of internal and external threats so they can stay ahead of cybercriminals and avoid costly breaches.

The problem is that many organizations aren’t getting as much value from their SIEM solution as they’d like. SecOps teams are bombarded with too many security alerts — a large majority of which are being generated by SIEM systems. Cybersecurity teams receiving 10,000 to 150,000 alerts per day are simply overwhelmed. It’s impossible to manually investigate every alert being generated. Therefore, your organization is left vulnerable as you try to pick and choose which alerts you’ll investigate based on what you hope are accurate severity codes.

You’ve invested heavily in SIEM; now what?

Many organizations have invested heavily in their SIEM solution over the past five years, but are still not getting the full value from the system.

The overwhelming number of false SIEM alerts means that many alerts aren’t investigated promptly, if at all. In fact, up to 70% of alerts are ignored due to lack of skilled staffing resources. This is problematic. Every alert ignored could lead to a breach.

What organizations need

Organizations need to be able to quickly and easily investigate all of their SIEM alerts and maintain a clear understanding of the state of security within their organization.

Security operations teams need:

  • More context surrounding alerts
  • Smarter SIEM alert logic
  • Better alert prioritization
  • Incident response automation
  • Centralized security information

The answer lies in security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR).

Improve security operations efficiency

Swimlane’s SAO solution works in conjunction with your existing SIEM and other IT security systems like IDS and EDR to improve SIEM alert logic — without the need for custom coding or connectors. SAO helps increase productivity by centralizing security intel, automating incident response, and measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) to better understand how your SecOps resources are performing.

Gather Metrics and Run ReportsCustomizable dashboards

Swimlane’s API-first architecture allows you to integrate all of your security systems to feed into one central platform. Whether you use Swimlane’s dashboard or feed information into your own systems, your SecOps team benefits from a clear and comprehensive view of how cybersecurity is functioning. This centralized threat intel provides your team with more context surrounding alerts, which helps them to prioritize threat investigations accordingly.

Incident response automation

Swimlane also enables security teams to automate manual and time-consuming tasks within their current incident response processes. Every automated step saves time, making it possible to address more alerts in the same amount of time without needing to scale your team.

Documented processes

SAO allows incident response processes to be clearly documented before being automated. By recording this information, processes are consistent and provide employees with the standardized workflows they need to handle alerts appropriately. What’s more, tribal knowledge isn’t lost when employees leave.

How Swimlane can help

Swimlane enables:

  • Optimized threat response – prioritize alerts and standardize workflows
  • Real-time oversight – generate reports and use threat response KPIs to understand current capabilities and determine future security needs
  • Improved staff utilization – better utilize staff expertise and reduce turnover
  • Reduced mean time to resolution – respond to more alerts in the same amount of time
  • Contextual incident response – leverage streamlined SIEM alert logic to analyze and resolve security alerts faster

Swimlane provides your SecOps team the SAO capabilities they need to improve security operations efficiency, while reducing risk and increasing threat protection.

Ready to respond to all of your SIEM alerts with better SIEM alert logic? Contact us to learn more about how SAO can help and schedule a demo to see Swimlane.

Download our Automating Incident Response eBook for more information on how SAO can improve your security operations.

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