Time is a precious commodity, something that most people wish they had more of. This includes the security operations center (SOC), as analysts are constantly under pressure to stay ahead of cyberattack methodologies to better ensure business continuity. And as sharp as our experts are, the team at WEI cannot create more hours for the day. Still, we can streamline and automate your security operations to effectively make it seem like we have done just that. Enhanced time efficiency is just one of six proven benefits that WEI, in collaboration with Cortex XSIAM by Palo Alto Networks, can offer.
1. Improved MTTD & MTTR
It may sound simplistic, but staying ahead of attackers is crucial for securing your enterprise. By reducing mean time to detect (MTTD), cyber teams are provided more time to respond effectively. Meanwhile, lowering your mean time to respond (MTTR) minimizes the impact of attacks, prevents their spread, and ensures greater business continuity. While the technology behind this is complex, let's focus on a single impactful metric to illustrate it. One customer success story with XSIAM saw their MTTR improve dramatically from 3 days to just 16 minutes. What’s more, this was achieved while handling 10 times more data to analyze. Another key metric was a 75% reduction in the number of incidents that required an investigation. All this highlights how AI-driven outcomes and an automation-first approach can significantly streamline security operations and speed up incident response.
2. Consolidation Of Disparate SOC Tools
A war chest of security tools may seem advantageous on paper, but managing a multitude of disparate SOC tools often leads to increased workload, inefficient workflows, and reduced clarity. Navigating between multiple products and consoles can and will make the difference when under serious attack, especially if your team is not proficient in all tools.
WEI’s modern SOC specialists can demonstrate how consolidating data from various security tools into a single platform like Cortex XSIAM not only offers a more cohesive view of your security landscape but also simplifies the management of these tools. Remember, a unified defense is often the most effective defense. By centralizing operations into a single platform, training requirements are reduced, and management tasks are streamlined, enhancing overall SOC efficiency.
Figure 1: Analyst Incident Management View
Figure 1: The analyst incident management view provides a full summary of actions automatically taken, the results, and all remaining suggested actions. A drill-down incident timeline is presented to the analyst if further investigation and response is required. This is also complemented by broad XSIAM intelligence from all analytics and functions.
3. Leverage Native AI And ML Models
AI and ML models are streamlining workloads across today’s organizations, making it clear that business processes can no longer depend on manual tasks. The same goes for the modern SOC. Amid intensifying attacks, it's essential to expand your visibility into potential security threats. With so many alerts pouring in from so many tools, SOC analysts struggle to prioritize which alerts to handle first and struggle in correlating events to piece the puzzle together.
WEI believes it is time to redefine SOC architecture into an automation-first approach. This involves leveraging historical data with machine learning to anticipate potential future security threats and vulnerabilities. It also means using machine learning and behavioral analysis to profile users and entities to identify patterns that may suggest a possible threat. Even better is the predictive capability of XSIAM that allows SOCs to proactively address security gaps and strengthen defenses before attackers can exploit them. By integrating AI and ML, WEI can transform your traditional reactive SOC operations into proactive, predictive security powerhouses that are designed to significantly enhance the security posture of your organization.
WEI Podcast: Discussing The Modern SOC, IR & Threat Hunting
4. Extend SOC Visibility And Control
Has your security visibility kept pace with the expansion of your IT estate? Amid intensifying attacks, it's essential to expand your visibility into potential security threats. If you utilize the cloud, then you need eyes in the sky as well as visibility into your remote computer edges. WEI knows how to consolidate data from various sources across the network, including endpoints, cloud environments, and third-party security tools.
This capability starts with full visibility into the logs and alerts from all your external sources. By seamlessly integrating with your existing security infrastructure, including firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and endpoint protection platforms, you gain enhanced visibility across all these layers. This integration enables more coordinated control over your security environment, allowing for a more comprehensive and effective security strategy. By centralizing data into one platform, SOCs gain a holistic view of their security posture.
5. Minute-By-Minute Threat Detection
As threat actors enhance their tactics, it's crucial to advance your threat detection methods accordingly. XSIAM’s integrated threat intelligence platform allows it to process and analyze vast volumes of data at high speed to ensure that any anomalous or potentially harmful activity is identified in real time. Security threats are seldom signaled by a single, clear indicator. XSIAM's intelligence capabilities are designed to piece together low-confidence events and detect patterns that warrant high-confidence alerts. XSIAM then uses predefined security playbooks and AI recommendations to initiate responses without human intervention, enabling immediate action against threats to mitigate risks. WEI can provide you with a cloud-native architecture that can automatically scale dynamically based on the volume of data and threat intensity to ensure constant security even during peak loads.
6. MITRE ATT&CK Leading Endpoint Protection
Security professionals increasingly acknowledge the importance of integrating the MITRE ATT&CK Framework into their security strategies. XSIAM features a dedicated dashboard for this comprehensive framework, providing teams with a detailed view of the protection modules and detection rules tailored to each specific MITRE tactic and technique. This integration enables XSIAM to precisely understand the techniques and tactics used by adversaries, allowing for the customization of its detection mechanisms.
This heightened sensitivity to known adversarial patterns enhances both the accuracy and relevance of incoming alerts. WEI security specialists have been guiding clients on how to effectively integrate the MITRE ATT&CK framework to achieve their desired security outcomes, and we are ready to do the same for you.
Talk To WEI
If all of this seems new to your organization, please know this is common practice for the cybersecurity experts at WEI. Contact us today to learn how our next-gen approach to security operations drives improved outcomes through integration and automation.
Next Steps: Palo Alto Networks’ commitment to developing a groundbreaking solution for modern SOCs has culminated in the creation of a new security platform, Cortex XSIAM. This next-gen platform is designed to propel SOCs beyond the capabilities of traditional SIEM systems, setting a new standard in the industry.
Download our free tech brief to learn more about this cloud-based, integrated SOC platform that includes best-in-class functions including EDR, XDR, SOAR, ASM, UEBA, TIP, and SIEM.
