The Path to Automating Incident Response with IR Platform

Incident response (IR) is critical to any organization’s security strategy. IR requires teams to identify threats and respond accordingly rapidly.

Automation is essential to improve IR efficiency. It allows teams to focus their efforts on high-risk incidents, reducing the volume of low-risk alerts and avoiding false positives.

Analytics

Incident management is a critical process that needs to be streamlined and automated so that teams can work faster. It means automating parts of incident response, like determining high-value targets, collecting endpoint forensics and managing investigations.

Traditionally, this workflow has been a slow, labor-intensive process. Repeating these tasks for every incident can significantly impact the speed at which security teams can deduce threat context, analyze anomalous activity and make decisions.

An incident response platform backed by SOAR (security orchestration, automation and response) technology can significantly improve prudent management by executing the entire response workflow at machine speed, deriving better threat context with advanced analysis and ensuring that analysts have access to relevant information. It also enables central measurement of SOC activity, including the number and types of incidents, mean time to detect and respond per analyst and more.

For an incident response to be effective, organizations must establish a comprehensive process, including policy, response plan and strategy. It will help ensure that any incident activity is contained and handled effectively to minimize losses, mitigate exploited vulnerabilities, restore services and processes and reduce the risk of future incidents.

Integrations

An incident response platform (IRP) helps security teams respond to incidents more efficiently and effectively. It automates critical incident response processes and provides a centralized dashboard for incident response teams.

A vital component of any IRP is the ability to create playbooks — scripts that define the steps a security solution or team member will take in response to an alert or event. Other security tools or responders can then execute these scripts, resulting in faster incident detection and response.

While the use of external incident response services is increasing, the integrations must be carefully managed to ensure they can provide the benefits you need. For example, IRP systems must be able to independently retrieve incident information from SIEM tools and current threat data from threat intelligence platforms.

In addition, a platform must be able to integrate with other incident response tools in your IT infrastructure and automate those systems to improve IRP performance. For example, IRPs must integrate with IT ticketing systems or IDP/IDS solutions to allow analysts or responders to open and manage tickets quickly.

A vital element of any IR system is the ability to review what steps worked and didn’t during previous incidents. It allows you to fine-tune your IRPs and make them more effective in the future.

Reporting

Regarding incident reporting, you need a platform to support your team’s workflows. The tool should provide a way to document information, collaborate seamlessly with other groups, and add more context to the resolution process.

The best incident management software can also offer oversight into the incident response process, backed by intelligence and analytics. It is critical for organizations that receive many alerts and need to respond quickly.

For example, Zendesk provides a single hub for service agents and admins to track incidents. This transparency can help build team camaraderie and improve incident management efficiency.

A centralized incident log lets you attach issues from different channels, including web and email submissions, to immediately link them to open problem tickets. It reduces duplication of effort and increases productivity, especially for multi-company support teams.

Incident response software that supports security automation and SOAR technology can significantly improve prudent management. It can reduce the time it takes analysts to triage, investigate, and identify indicators of compromise (IoC).

Streamlining the incident response process is one of the most important aspects of any security automation system. An incident response platform should integrate with your workflows, triggering time-saving automation and facilitating cross-functional collaboration. It should also allow you to monitor and report on tool and staff efficiency, which can help you establish ROI.

Automation

All the information you need is essential to incident management and resolution. With automation, switching between tools and recording information is a manageable task. Plus, you might need more critical information along the way.

An incident response platform can streamline all incident management and resolution tasks into a unified tool. It helps engineers focus on what’s most important at any given time and keeps everything centralized, simplifying work.

Automated incident management tools also provide alert triage capabilities, which can help keep security analysts focused on the dangerous alerts to your company. Keeping signals at a minimum can save your team work hours and reduce the Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR).

In addition to alerts, many automated IR tools include log management features that collect and filter data from security tools like firewalls and endpoint forensics. It can dramatically increase the efficiency of your incident response team’s efficiency by reducing the time they spend combing through alarms and identifying relevant events.