Strengthen Digital Resilience with Unified Security Operations

By Mike Horn March 21, 2023

A critical step in building digital resilience is enabling SOC teams to manage detection, investigation, and response workflows from a single work surface. By prioritizing risk, utilizing pre-built SOC processes, and leveraging automation to drive an investigation, your analysts save time and energy and better prevent lateral movement of attackers within your organization.

Security Operations Challenges

SecOps challenges are being summarized into a few key buckets by our customers. First, they agree that threat detection, investigation and response capabilities are scattered across different systems and siloed security tools, making it challenging for teams to gain a holistic view of security events, coordinate responses, and resolve incidents efficiently and quickly. Furthermore, a constant flood of security alerts - along with the ongoing threat of new and complex attacks - has overwhelmed the SOC, causing large incident backlogs that increase risks. With no other choice but to manually investigate and respond to these events, analysts are unable to close cases fast enough to reduce their backlogs, trapping them in a never ending cycle of reactivity.

These challenges are also validated by recent statistics from Splunk's State of Security Report 2022. According to this study, 64% of respondents report difficulty keeping up with security requirements due to increased complexity. These respondents expressed this view for a number of reasons. 1.) 30% say that they have an overwhelmingly complex security stack of tools; 2.) Unplanned downtime tied to a cybersecurity incident is up to 14 hours with a cost of $200,000 on average; and 3.) These issues are leading to a high amount of burnout in the security industry with 73% of respondents citing that they have colleagues quitting due to burnout. All of this is causing security teams to drive product consolidation to simplify operations.

Bringing Order to the Chaos

Bringing order to the chaos of security operations is where Splunk can really deliver results and is why we are dedicated to ensuring our customers' digital resilience. We are doubling down on our unified security operations solution - Mission Control - that combines security analytics (Splunk Enterprise Security), orchestration and automation (Splunk SOAR), and threat intelligence under one work surface. This integration of core SOC tools enables Splunk Mission Control to offer a unified, simplified, and modernized security operations experience, which reduces complexity and reduces risk. Mission Control enables analysts to detect, investigate and respond faster; automate manual tasks to increase analyst effectiveness; and ultimately embed digital and cyber resilience into the operational fabric of the SOC.

Quickly after implementing Mission Control, GoTo's Technical Manager, Security Operations, Michael Rennie said, "GoTo sees Splunk Mission Control as a solution that can take its security operation to the next level. The more we can centralize our SOAR, threat intelligence and ticketing system data in Mission Control, the more time we can save."

Watch this demo video to see this in action.

 

Unify Detection, Investigation and Response in a Single Work Surface

By integrating workflows across detection, investigation, and response, analysts can gain a comprehensive view of security insights and trends, determine risk more quickly, and stop pivoting between multiple security management consoles. As a result, teams are able to detect, investigate, and respond to security incidents faster, and close the right cases faster.

With an incident queue organized by risk, analysts can also better understand their priorities. In order to gain situational awareness across a complex security and IT environment, analysts need to drill into these detections to uncover data insights from thousands of technology integrations and data sources. Finally, by accessing threat intelligence context for risky incidents they can improve decision-making.

Simplify Your Security Workflows with Standardized Processes

Mission Control codifies security operating procedures into predefined templates, improving SOC process adherence. This allows your team to build repeatable processes to initiate investigations faster in the face of a security incident, react accurately when critical events arise, and ultimately, create a more robust security posture.

Instead of manually coordinating workflows across disparate management systems, SOC teams can use prebuilt templates in Mission control to align procedures previously dispersed across teams and technology. This not only lets you achieve more repeatable security operations, but also close the gap between detection and rapid incident response. Prebuilt templates can also be used to prepare and train your team for key security use cases like "Encoded PowerShell Response," "Insider Threat Response" or "Ransomware Response."

For faster time-to-value, you can also embed preconfigured Splunk Search queries into these templates. Mission Control offers full access to the Splunk Search interface, minimizing pivots between tabs and instances. In Mission Control, you can search for data from your SOC process templates, including task owners, start times, finish times, notes, and files. You can then determine where your team is experiencing bottlenecks by measuring things like task duration. When you measure everything, you will be able to improve SOC management and know where automation is needed.

Modernize with the Speed of Security Automation

Using Splunk SOAR, analysts can automate manual, repetitive security processes across a disparate security stack so they can investigate and respond quickly. You can use the SOAR component to deploy playbooks within Mission Control that automate investigative and response tasks in accordance with response templates. This reduces the need to pivot between management consoles to shift from detection workflows to investigation and response workflows. Embedding SOAR into your operations ensures that detections receive automatic responses. The result: more time to focus on mission-critical objectives, and adopt more proactive, nimble security operations.

Playbooks and actions can be run directly in Mission Control, allowing users to access Splunk's wide connector ecosystem of 370+ apps. 2,800+ actions support a variety of integrations across security and IT use cases, so analysts can plug and play. Increasing job satisfaction and keeping your SOC running smoothly will lead to a more resilient organization with reduced burnout and turnover.

Closing

By unifying threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR) workflows from a single interface, SOC teams can build digital resilience. Disjointed tools and data, complex SOC processes, and overwhelmed security analysts are among the top SecOps challenges that can be addressed through this unification. The convergence of SIEM and SOAR technologies simplifies and modernizes investigations by integrating detections, response templates, and automation.

To learn more about Splunk Mission Control, visit our website and please register for one of the upcoming webinars to dig deeper into features and use cases.

• April 5th, 2023 - 10am PT/1pm ET
• April 27th, 2023 - 10am SGT/12pm AEST