There are many cybersecurity tools that give SecOps analysts visibility into various aspects of their IT and OT infrastructure. In fact, most mid-sized and large businesses and MSSPs have a dozen or more such tools in their portfolio.
The problem is analyst productivity. Multiple threats occur every day (often hourly); but when analysts have to spend an hour or more tracking and remediating a single threat, they feel like they’re drowning in threats, SecOps protection is at risk, and no one has peace of mind.
AI technology is on everyone’s lips these days, and most cybersecurity solution providers have jumped on the bandwagon. While it is acceptable to use AI to automate key functions in individual tools, it is far better to use it to unify threat detection, analysis and remediation across the entire infrastructure . This requires not only AI-driven tools, but also an AI-driven SecOps platform that aggregates inputs from each tool to provide comprehensive threat visibility and management.
Platform-level AI
One of the benefits of open SecOps platforms incorporating AI technology is their ability to automatically ingest, normalize, and analyze data from many different third-party tools – tools that SecOps managers already have at their disposal. This dramatically (and quickly) improves analyst productivity: new AI-based platforms can be up and running within a day. Some vendors cite customer productivity improvements of 8X for MTTD and 20X for MTTR.
Most modern SecOps platforms also improve productivity by pointing more specifically to threat locations and remediation procedures. Using scripts or playbooks, the platforms allow teams to codify specific threats and automate procedures to resolve them.
An effective SecOps platform must:
- Ingest, standardize and enrich all security data, including endpoint, network, cloud and logs, into a single repository
- Automatically detect and correlate alerts
- Accelerate threat investigations and threat hunting with contextual data and correlated incidents
- Provide real-time automated and manual response actions
- Expand threat detection, investigation and response in any environment
- Deliver automated AI-powered threat hunting and response actions that work without complex coding requirements.
Extending AI to the Platform Level
More recently, we have seen AI-driven endpoint security platforms that “hyperautomate” endpoint-related SecOps tasks across the entire infrastructure. By integrating with such tools, open SecOps platforms enable security teams to deploy intelligent, automated, and hyperautomated workflows across their security operations processes, eliminating tedious and time-consuming manual tasks. that undermine the efficiency and productivity of a security team. Here’s how it can work:
- Cases created in the SecOps platform are shared autonomously with the hyperautomation platform
- Security analysts can launch their response workflows to mitigate the threat of a cyberattack in minutes
- Once the case is complete, the hyperautomation platform communicates the result of the response actions to the SecOps platform, thus closing the loop of the case on both platforms.
Benefits of Platform Integration
Tight, bi-directional integration between an AI-enabled SecOps platform and an AI-enabled hyperautomation SecOps platform provides several key benefits:
- Automated, AI-powered threat hunting and response actions that work without complicated coding requirements.
- Scalable threat detection, investigation and response in any environment
- Improved visibility to reduce the risk of a damaging breach
- A dramatic increase in security analyst productivity and efficiency
- Reduced attacker dwell time, thereby minimizing attack impacts
- Improving the ROI of Existing Security Stack Investments
- High-fidelity cases ready to study, eliminating manual processes
As AI technology permeates the cybersecurity landscape, it makes sense to leverage it wherever possible – not to eliminate human intervention, but to make those interventions much more effective. The more productive SecOps analysts are, the more secure their organization will be. And in a world where cyberattacks are becoming more prevalent and sophisticated virtually by the hour, SecOps organizations need all the help they can get. To find out more, contact Stellar Cyber Or Couple.
Guest blog courtesy of Stellar Cyber. Read more Stellar Cyber guest blogs and news here. Regularly contributed guest blogs are part of MSSP alerts Sponsorship Program.
