What is SOC Automation?

The Security Operations Center (SOC) is the heart of an organization’s security program. SOC responsibilities include performing continuous monitoring of an organization’s IT environment and identifying, triaging, and remediating potential security issues.

As corporate networks grow larger and more complex, the SOC has an expanding range of duties. SOC automation uses artificial intelligence (AI) and security automation to relieve the burden on human analysts by automating common and repetitive tasks within the SOC.

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How Does It Work?

AI has evolved rapidly in recent years, as demonstrated by the growth of generative AI and advanced large language models (LLMs). These tools have access to a range of data and allow analysts to interact with and query this data using natural language.

SOC automation can streamline SOC processes by taking over certain tasks. For example, AI is well-suited to collecting security data from multiple sources, applying advanced data analytics to it, and identifying potential issues based on anomalies and known threats. By doing so, AI combats alert overload and enables analysts to focus their attention on real problems.

SOC automation can also help with remediating issues once they have been identified. Analysts can create playbooks and runbooks for certain tasks or remediation actions, and these can be executed automatically to perform the task rapidly at scale.

The Benefits of SOC Automation

SOC automation has the ability to streamline a SOC’s operations by offloading certain tasks from humans to automated systems. Some of the benefits that SOC automation can provide include the following:

Improved Threat Detection: SOC automation uses AI and data analytics to process large volumes of alert data and weed out false positives. By reducing alert volume and drawing analysts’ attention to true threats rather than false positives, it speeds identification and investigation of true threats.
Faster Incident Remediation: In addition to automating threat detection capabilities, SOC automation can also speed up incident response. Predefined playbooks enable certain threats to be handled automatically, reducing mean time to remediation (MTTR).
Improved SOC Productivity: SOC automation eliminates manual, repetitive tasks for security personnel. This enhances SOC productivity by using analysts’ time and efforts where they are most necessary.
Consistent Security Responses: Automated playbooks and runbooks not only improve speed, they also ensure consistent responses. This helps to reduce security incidents caused by errors made while performing manual, repetitive tasks.
Greater SOC Scalability: SOC automation enhances the scalability of the SOC by transferring certain tasks from human analysts to automated systems. Automated playbooks are much more scalable than manual processes.
Reduced OpEx: SOC automation reduces the time spent performing manual, repetitive tasks in the SOC. As a result, an organization pays less to achieve the same level of security.
Improved Job Satisfaction: Burnout is common in the security field. Reducing manual tasks and SOC workloads can help to enhance the job satisfaction of security personnel.

Use Cases to Automate in the SOC

AI has grown much more sophisticated in recent years, greatly expanding its potential applications. Some of the ways that SOCs can take advantage of automation include:

Alert Triage: AI can process alerts, remove false positives, aggregate related events, and prioritize true threats for further analysis.
Incident Response: Automated playbooks can be used to remediate certain threats, reducing the time until normal operations are restored.
Threat Hunting: AI correlates and analyzes security data, making enriched records available to security analysts for threat hunting.
Malware Analysis: Automated sandboxes can be used to detonate suspected malware to detect threats and determine its capabilities.
Phishing Detection: Phishing emails can be identified and blocked by using natural language processing (NLP) to identify suspicious wordings and sandboxes to detect malicious attachments.

How Should Teams Leverage SOC Automation?

Automation can be used in the SOC in a few different ways, including the following:

Automate manual, repetitive tasks.
Streamline analysis and prioritization of security alerts.
Speed incident remediation via predefined playbooks.
Detect malware, phishing, and other threats.

What to Look for in a SOC Automation Tool

A SOC automation tool should include the following key features:

Use of generative AI to improve usability.
Support for predefined playbooks for common tasks and incident response.
Ability to customize to meet the evolving needs of the business.
Integration with an organization’s existing security architecture.

SOC Automation with Check Point

As corporate environments grow and evolve and the cyber threat landscape becomes more sophisticated, SOC automation is crucial to an organization’s ability to keep up. Check Point’s Infinity Extended Prevention and Response (XDR/XPR) uncovers the most stealthy attacks fast by correlating events across your entire security estate and combining with behavioral analytics, real-time proprietary threat intelligence from Check Point Research and ThreatCloud AI, and third-party intelligence. It also includes Infinity Playblocks Security Automation & Collaboration Platform with dozens of automated, off-the-shelf prevention playbooks to contain attacks and prevent lateral spread before damage is done while reducing operational overhead and human error. To learn more about XDR/XPR prevent-first approach download the XDR White Paper, Playblocks solution brief, or sign up for a free demo today.