The biggest challenges to SOC automation are:
Challenges to SOC Automation
Lack of SOC Automation Knowledge.
To be successful with SOC automation, organizations must have advanced knowledge of network security, including threat intelligence and the technical infrastructure needed to support SOC automation tools, for instance.
Lack of Resources for Automated Security Response.
In today’s threat-laden environment, SOCs face a great deal of pressure to be fully operational 24/7. As a result, the SOC is often understaffed and overwhelmed with too many alerts to investigate.
Lack of Automated Response.
Automated security response is the main goal of SOC automation. In theory, the automated response would allow SOC analysts to spend more time focusing on high-risk alerts and ancillary tasks (i.e. triage, investigation) while allowing the automated tools to scan massive amounts of data and respond to low-risk threats (i.e., remediation).
Unfortunately, there are still major technical limitations that prevent automated responses from becoming a reality.
Lack of Security Talent.
The cyber security industry has a shortage of skilled workers to fill open positions. Another problem is that few people want to work in a SOC where they will be bombarded with thousands of false positives per day:
The problem with false positives is that they require a lot of work to investigate. However, with the limited amount of time SOC analysts have available, there are simply not enough hours in the day to investigate every alert. As a result, many false positives are left uninvestigated, which is a security risk.
How to Deal With Challenges in SOC Operations?
The following are some strategies for dealing with the challenges of SOC operations:
Use advanced security analytics tools.
Advanced security analytics tools can help SOC teams quickly and effectively triage alerts by providing the necessary context to increase the effectiveness of investigations.
Automate investigations.
Automated investigation tools can help SOC teams perform root-cause analysis on alerts that are prioritized as high risk. This allows security analysts to focus their efforts on high-risk threats while allowing automated responses to handle low-risk threats.
Provide training.
To be successful with SOC automation, organizations need to have advanced knowledge of network security, including threat intelligence and the technical infrastructure needed to support SOC automation tools.
Integrate threat intelligence into SOC toolset.
Organizations should integrate threat intelligence into their existing SOC toolset to take advantage of threat intelligence feeds and improve investigations by leveraging threat intelligence data.
Automate remediation.
Automated remediation is the final stage of SOC automation. The goal of automated remediation is to automatically respond to a threat with a security product or configuration control, based on threat intelligence.
Conclusion
In conclusion, SOC automation tools are becoming increasingly important to a security operations center’s ability to investigate and remediate threats. However, SOCs need to be aware of the challenges associated with SOC automation.
Also, if an organization chooses to implement SOC automation, it is important to understand the maturity of the toolset. A mature toolset has at least one automated investigation tool and one automated remediation tool.
