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Data is often the instrument that comes to mind when leaders think about accelerating business strategy, but the framework of people, processes, and technology (PPT) together has long been understood as fundamentally necessary for organizational transformation.
A Security Operations Center (SOC) is the embodiment of such a framework. In a 2018 survey, the SANS Institute defined a SOC as “A combination of people, processes and technology protecting the information systems of an organization through proactive design and configuration, ongoing monitoring of system state, detection of unintended actions or undesirable state, and minimizing damage from unwanted effects.”
SOC teams have an incredibly important job, and yet most SOC teams face a constant uphill battle with a lack of technology resources, not to mention high turnover rates for skilled workers who experience a daily barrage of thousands of alerts that are monitored and triaged via manual processes. While the value of PPT is unmistakable in concept, it is also ironically unattainable without significant investments in exactly that. Investments in people, processes, or technology can be difficult to obtain the necessary buy-in without meaningful data to correlate the ROI of such an investment.
Extracting meaning from copious amounts of unstructured data is a daunting task, much less turning that data into something actionable and measurable, both of which are critical aspects for getting stakeholder buy-in. Let’s look at how the functions of a Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platform can help with all of this.
SOAR platforms like ThreatConnect’s provide a central location to integrate an organization’s myriad of security tools and processes. A platform that can provide a single source of truth is incredibly powerful for documenting processes and identifying opportunities to increase efficiency through automation and orchestration. Overburdened SOC teams can more easily scale decisions and take action to correlate, prioritize, and triage alerts with a smart SOAR platform that unites the SOC, incident response, and cyber threat intelligence functions into one platform as a system of record. The ability to provide insights into the effectiveness of people, processes, and technology working together is one way SOAR platforms can help SOC leaders communicate meaningful metrics to business stakeholders and cultivate buy-in.
ThreatConnect’s Workflow feature is designed with collaboration across PPT in mind, enabling analysts and SOC teams to define and operationalize consistent, standardized processes for managing threat intelligence and routine security operations. The ability to collect and report on metrics around Workflow as key performance indicators (KPIs) for security teams, amplifies the visibility of their operations and underscores the realized value that an intelligence-driven platform brings. This is data that easily translates the return on investment and provides insights into how to optimize security operations.
ThreatConnect 6.4 introduces enhancements to Workflow metrics, providing deeper insights that show trends for detection and response across a period of time. These new features include:
- The addition of a new dashboard visualization, showing Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) over variable periods of time to help SOC leaders evaluate detection and response trends.
- SOC team leaders can gain perspective on the distribution of team case assignments, seeing the breakdown of active cases by users and user groups, as well as insights for how to best prioritize unassigned cases by severity, empowering more informed decisions when managing the workload of the team.
Enabling SOC teams with a platform that can enrich investigations, document processes and procedures for risk, governance, and compliance, and facilitate consistent and collaborative incident response, equips an organization to understand exactly how they are performing. With built-in return on investment calculators and activity management tools, ThreatConnect’s smart SOAR platform provides organizations with risk-led, data-driven value that business stakeholders can easily understand.
For more details on ThreatConnect’s newest features now available with 6.4, please reach out to our Customer Success Team or email us at sales@threatconnect.com.