Data is, arguably, the most valuable commodity on the planet. It is at the core of modern businesses, informing marketing efforts, product design, cybersecurity, and everything in between. But one can have too much of a good thing. The extraordinary amount of data inherent in modern enterprise environments has left security teams overwhelmed, over-fatigued, and over-stretched. This is where SOC automation comes in.

SOC automation is fast becoming a business necessity. Modern SOCs manage a vast number of alerts, tools, and endpoints, and security teams simply cannot keep up. This has a significant impact on organizational security: a 2024 study from IBM found that nearly half of security professionals say the average time to detect and respond to an incident has increased over the past two years.

But how, exactly, can SOC automation improve incident response times? It’s clear that security teams believe automation is necessary – 80% say that manual investigation of threats slows down their overall threat response times – but what does automated incident response look like, and how can SOCs bring it to fruition?

Benefits of SOC Automation for Incident Response

First, let’s explore the benefits of SOC automation for incident response.

Streamlining Incident Triage and Prioritization

Quick and effective incident triage and prioritization are crucial to incident response. Modern SOC teams are inundated with alerts, many of which are false positives. Investigating each alert manually can be time-consuming, delaying response times to genuine threats.

To address this issue, SOC automation can filter and correlate alerts from many security tools and resources and use machine learning and pre-defined rules to identify the most critical threats. Security teams can then use this information to inform incident response efforts, focusing only on genuine threats while ignoring false positives they would otherwise have to investigate.

Accelerating Incident Investigation

Investigating a threat is laborious. Analysts must gather and analyze large amounts of data from multiple systems to build a comprehensive picture of a threat and inform response actions. Again, automation can streamline this process, correlating data from different environments – such as on-premises, cloud, and endpoints – to give analysts an overview of a threat before it causes any damage.

Enabling Faster Containment and Remediation

Once an analyst has investigated a threat, they need to contain it as quickly as possible to prevent it from causing damage. Manual threat containment can be slow, especially in a large and complex IT environment, meaning analysts often reach threats too late. To overcome this, security teams can develop playbooks that automatically execute in response to a specific incident – for example, disabling a compromised user account or isolating affected devices.

Improving Incident Response Consistency and Compliance

Inconsistency and human error are problems for even the most professional security teams. They often result in incomplete threat remediation – which can leave gaps for cybercriminals to relaunch an attack – and compliance issues, such as those associated with GDPR or HIPAA. Automated playbooks execute the exact same response actions in response to specific incidents, meaning that incident response doesn't vary from occurrence to occurrence. They also provide detailed logs and reports to help during compliance audits.

Enhancing Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing

It’s a less obvious benefit, but SOC automation can even improve communication and collaboration among security teams. Automation solutions can share relevant information, update incident status, and assign tasks to appropriate teams, further reducing the burden on security staff. Similarly, they can create a knowledge base of past incidents that analysts can use to inform future response efforts.

Implementing SOC Automation for Incident Response

If you want to automate your SOC, you have two options: develop your SOC automation solution yourself or purchase a ready-made Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) solution. Each comes with its benefits, challenges, and use cases, so here’s a basic overview of each to help you make an informed decision.

Homegrown SOC Automation

Ready-Made SOAR Solutions

Conclusion

SOC automation can dramatically improve incident response. SOC automation is necessary for effective incident response in the modern threat landscape. It is the most impactful method of reducing the burden on overstretched SOC analysts and improving an organization’s security posture. Implement SOC automation now to avoid catastrophe later.