Security Orchestration 101

The threat of cyber security and cyber attacks has never been as high as it is right now does security orchestration is the solution.

Our modern world is incredibly dependent on the internet and online connectivity in a way that wasn’t even possible previously. All of us have internet-enabled devices in our pockets, in our homes, and in our offices. Also a tremendous amount of our modern life occurs online as well.

We buy and pay for things online. We handle our banking and our investing online. And we depend on businesses and organizations that use our private, personal, and payment information to do everything they can to secure that data so that it stays both private and personal.

That’s where security orchestration comes into play.

Security orchestration solutions are designed specifically to allow individual organizations to better understand security threats that exist right now as well as threats that may exist in the future. Think of these tools as solutions that actively monitor IT infrastructure, online activity, and a number of global markers as well to determine whether or not the cyber-security solutions used to protect from attacks are sufficient.

In a world this connected it is of the utmost importance that organizations are doing everything they can to not only lock down their technology and their data, but also to actively monitor cyber security threats around the world that are happening in real time as well.

We’ve seen a number of cyber threats and attacks that have spread like wildfire simply because an exchange of information in real time either wasn’t possible or wasn’t leveraged in the past. With security orchestration automation and response (sometimes called SOAR), organizations can now combine human and machine power in an effort to better understand threats that are happening at any one particular point in time AND patch security holes and flaws almost in real time.

By leveraging the tools provided by security orchestration vendors organizations are able to better analyze their own internal security, to better understand where they are vulnerable and what they need to do to overcome these vulnerabilities, and to properly analyze cyber threats as they occur – and they most definitely will occur (in our modern world it’s a matter of when and not if) – to move forward with better protection on a day-to-day basis than what was in place the day before.

Automation is a Big Piece of the Puzzle

A major push forward as far as SOAR is concerned is automating as much of the “heavy lifting” of this cybersecurity as humanly possible, putting a significant amount of security orchestration automation and response in the hands of machines that can move more efficiently, move more effectively, and move faster to get out in front of cyber threats than active human monitoring ever could.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you can eliminate the human element from security orchestration altogether. Automation is a big piece of the puzzle to be sure, but the human element is still critical for recognizing threats and separating them from false positives while at the same time fine-tuning security orchestration automation and response to provide you with an “always there” bubble of protection at the same time.

This is why the world of security orchestration is usually broken down into two major and distinct groups:

• • Security Orchestration – Security orchestration is designed to integrate cybersecurity and IT operations in a way that allows for a more efficient flow of information and communication to keep an online environment secure. The tools that allow for the sharing of internal data to recognize potential external threats is a big piece of security orchestration, giving individual human investigators the opportunity to drill deeper into these data points as well as the alerts that may be coming in from around the world to find out exactly what’s going on as far as the security of the environment is concerned.

• • Security Automation – Automation is simply finding a way to automate as much of the security solutions for a given environment as possible, removing the human equation from the security element and allowing machines to handle the heavy lifting of locking down and securing something. You want to eliminate intervention so that these kinds of security solutions can be deployed instantaneously and without human interference, but at the same time want to employ regular reporting and analysis details so that the automated system can be fine-tuned and improved on a regular basis.

Integration is Critical

Most security orchestration vendors worth their salt are going to tell you that the security orchestration solutions they provide (including security orchestration open source options) are only as good as their integration into your existing setup or your existing workflow.

You could have the most advanced security orchestration automation and response (SOAR) solution on the planet available to take advantage of, but if you aren’t willing or aren’t able to integrate these new tools directly into your currently existing security setup or your security workflow they aren’t going to do you any good at all.

You want to be sure that you’re able to directly integrate these solutions and with the help of security orchestration vendors that’s almost always going to be pretty easy.

You’ll also want to make sure that the new security orchestration solutions your leveraging improve your overall response time, simplify the investigation process significantly, and minimizes the danger that you face from attacks today and tomorrow.

It’s important to find SOAR solutions that also reduce the amount of time that you spend focusing on false positives. Automation tools should eliminate as much of the heavy lifting manual, human intervention has to take care of while at the same time eliminating as much potential for false positives as possible.

You will be able to get rid of all false positives with the way that cybersecurity changes and evolves on a day-to-day basis, but you don’t want your new security orchestration setup have you chasing ghosts, either.

At the end of the day, it’s paramount to keep personal, private, and protected data locked down and out of the hands of cyber thieves and cyber criminals. SOAR helps you do exactly that.