Make Your Business Soar with SOAR

Nine out of 10 IT and security leaders believe their organizations are falling short in addressing cyber risks, according to IDG’s 2021 Security Priorities Study.  As a result, they’re increasingly outsourcing security to managed services providers who can provide the expertise that may be missing due to skills and talent shortages. In fact, 21% of organizations will have fully outsourced their security functions by 2022.

They’re also implementing proactive security strategies and tools, such as zero trust and SOAR. SOAR is security orchestration and automated response and, according to Gartner, it refers to solutions that:

“…combine incident response, orchestration and automation, and threat intelligence (TI) management capabilities in a single platform. SOAR tools are also used to document and implement processes (aka playbooks, workflows and processes); support security incident management; and apply machine-based assistance to human security analysts and operators. Workflows can be orchestrated via integrations with other technologies, and automated to achieve desired outcomes, such as:

• Incident triage
• Incident response
• TI curation and management
• Compliance monitoring and management

Ongoing Issues: Fewer Resources, Increasing Attacks, Multiple Tools

The problems for today’s organizations are immense. The Ponemon Institute’s 2020 Cyber Resilient Organization Study reports that, on average, organizations deploy 45 cybersecurity tools on their networks, creating a complexity that hinders their ability to detect and defend against active attacks. When compared to companies employing fewer tools, organizations that deploy 50+ tools ranked themselves 8% lower in their ability to detect threats and 7% lower in their defensive capabilities.

In addition, organizations continue to struggle with an ongoing dearth of security talent. Analysts estimate that, by 2025, 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs will go unfilled globally.

This already massive talent shortage is being exacerbated by pandemic-related attrition. Recent research suggests that half of first-time security analysts plan to leave after just three months, and none plan to stay longer than 18 months. Why?

• Mundane tasks (51%)
• Frustration with events outside their control (45%)
• Inability to allocate time effectively (30%)
• Pressure cooker environment (29%)

The attrition problem isn’t just limited to junior analysts, however. Nearly half (48%) of more seasoned security analysts are considering leaving within the year due to:

• Reduced workforce fueling increasingly high workloads (46%)
• On-the-job pressures (42%)
• More time spent on non-productive tasks (40%)
• Disrupted work-life balance (34%)

Just getting back to pre-pandemic levels would require herculean effort.

This considerable draining of cybersecurity competency has resulted in many fewer resources to combat increasing numbers of attacks using many more tools.

The Value of SOAR Platforms  

Mitigating talent and skills gaps and ongoing attrition issues is precisely where SOAR can help. Coupled with zero trust, SOAR combines the data coming from multiple tools to condition that “if this happens,” an automated response “to do this” occurs.  Click on Page 2 to continue reading…