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Orchestrate response workflows

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Orchestrating response workflows is crucial for enhancing the effectiveness of your SOC. Teams often grapple with the integration challenges posed by a diverse array of tools from various vendors within their security stack. Issues such as incompatible data output formats and the need to navigate multiple products contribute to incident resolution delays and resource over-utilization. This complexity also hampers the SOC's ability to address key challenges, including limited visibility and difficulties in scaling incident response efforts. Consequently, the disjointed nature of these tools can create security gaps and impede information sharing with external parties.

What are the benefits of orchestrating response workflows?

Embracing orchestrated response workflows, facilitated by platforms like Splunk SOAR (SOAR), empowers SOCs to streamline their operations. By automating repetitive tasks, investigations, and responses, this approach significantly enhances efficiency and productivity within the security team, fostering a more proactive response to potential threats.

By building security orchestration into the incident response process, you let your system monitor, review, and initiate a response, rather than having people monitor your security posture and manually react to events. Incident response teams see hundreds of alerts per day, and if analysts continue to respond to alerts in the same way, they risk alert fatigue. Over time, analysts can become desensitized to alerts which can lead to mistakes when handling ordinary situations or overlooking unusual alerts that need to be reviewed.

Orchestration via Splunk SOAR helps avoid alert fatigue by using workflow actions, or playbooks, that process the repetitive and ordinary alerts, leaving analysts to handle the most sensitive and unique incidents. Purpose-driven dynamic playbooks allow you to adopt quick, decision-based practices on new incidents and focus on high-level investigations while reducing repetitive investigative tasks.

You can achieve the following benefits through Splunk SOAR orchestration:

  • Triage alarms more effectively
  • Respond to critical events faster
  • Seamlessly integrate your existing security solutions into a more efficient and comprehensive incident response program
  • Centrally automate retrieval, sharing, and response actions for improved detection, investigation and remediation times
  • Improve operational efficiency using workflow based context with automated and human-assisted decision making
  • Extend new insights into threats by leveraging context, data enrichment, and adaptive response

What are response flow orchestration best practices?

You can become more efficient by programmatically orchestrating steps within incident response processes.

First, identify the remediation pattern to an event or use Splunk Enterprise Security notables, and then codify those items into actionable logic using the visual editor, or through the integrated development environment.

Responders can then execute playbooks to triage, escalate, and remediate issues. Over time you can automate more and more steps, and ultimately automatically handle common incidents, freeing up your analysts to focus on critical threats.

You can also use Splunk Security Essentials (SSE) to identify content where there are recommended SOAR playbooks available, and access guidance on how those playbooks can help to address threats through automation.

During an incident, timing matters, and analysts need to zero in on the evidence that leads to resolution. Implementing content-based processes to quickly tap into correlated security incidents and events helps you achieve your mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR) goals.

What response flow orchestration processes can I put in place?

These additional resources will help you implement this guidance: