To deploy SecOps automation effectively, the following steps should be followed to ensure a smooth and successful integration of Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) into your existing operations:
When preparing for SecOps automation, it's essential to consider the following steps that can help optimize the transition toward automation for both you and your organization:
Evaluating your current policies and processes is crucial to identify areas that can be streamlined through automation. This includes understanding how incidents are currently handled and the manual steps involved in the process.
Take stock of the tools and platforms your team uses daily. Understanding the existing technology landscape and data sources is key to identifying potential integration points and areas where automation can have the greatest impact.
Clarify who needs to be involved in resolving security incidents. This can include the security team and other relevant stakeholders within the organization.
Consider standardizing your processes to ensure they are repeatable and consistent. This involves identifying areas where automation can bring consistency and reliability to security operations.
How can you standardize your processes so they’re repeatable and consistent?
What are your policies and procedures around incident assignments?
How are you communicating incidents internally?
Evaluating how incidents are communicated internally is crucial. Automating communication processes can help streamline information dissemination and improve response times.
TIP: It is important to clearly define the scope to facilitate resource allocation, determine the necessary skill sets, and ensure the team receives adequate training for the automation initiative.
To begin the automation journey, organizations should focus on tasks that offer significant value and are straightforward to automate. It is best to start with repetitive tasks such as collecting information, generating sandbox reports, sending communications out to users, running queries across various tools, and coordinating with other teams. Assigning an owner to each task ensures accountability and steady progress.
Organizations should consider:
It is essential to prioritize automating these smaller, high-impact tasks before attempting to automate an entire workflow from start to finish.
Starting with prebuilt playbooks and integrations is advisable for those without coding expertise. Solutions like Cortex XSOAR offer a wide range of ready-made playbooks that cover everyday use cases. Its visual editor makes it easy to customize these playbooks without coding. Building blocks like entity enrichment, indicator blocking, and hunting playbooks can be reused across multiple scenarios, quickly delivering value to security operations.
Adopt a step-by-step approach—the crawl-walk-run method—to build confidence in cybersecurity automation gradually. Start small with basic tasks and progressively automate more complex processes as you become familiar with the platform.
Selecting the right tool is critical when implementing security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solutions. Begin with a Proof of Concept (PoC) to validate the benefits of automation in a controlled setting. Use the PoC to test specific tasks, like alert triage or threat detection, and gather insights for broader deployment.
Develop and test automation playbooks to define actions for different security events. Start by automating repetitive tasks, such as data enrichment or alert correlation, and integrate these playbooks with your existing security tools.
As your team gains confidence, gradually expand automation to cover more complex workflows, moving towards end-to-end security operations automation. This measured approach helps optimize processes and fully leverage the benefits of cybersecurity automation.
Automation provides significant advantages to organizations of all sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises. While mature security processes can enhance automation efforts, they are optional for getting started. Smaller organizations, in particular, can benefit by automating routine tasks to free up resources for more complex challenges.
Organizations should begin by leveraging out-of-the-box playbooks and integrations to automate straightforward, repetitive tasks. As teams build experience and confidence, they can gradually advance to automating full workflows and more complex use cases. This phased approach ensures that automation delivers maximum value at every stage, regardless of the organization's size or maturity level.
Automated workflows guarantee consistent outputs by following the same processes every time. This uniformity standardizes responses and accelerates onboarding new security operations center (SOC) analysts by embedding best practices directly into playbooks.
Consistent workflows also simplify the replacement of point products, reducing operational downtime. Whether or not automation is in place, well-documented and standardized security processes are essential for enhancing team efficiency and managing incidents effectively.
Peer review is a critical step in ensuring the effectiveness of your use cases. By involving colleagues and other teams in your organization, you can identify issues and missed steps, leading to improved automation.
Before deploying your automated workflows into production, they should undergo managerial approval. Consider a development-to-production workflow and track time-sensitive tasks as needed. Determine if service-level agreements (SLAs) should be tracked for follow-ups or remediation actions.
Before deploying automated workflows in a production environment, they should undergo managerial review and approval. Implement a development-to-production workflow that includes tracking time-sensitive tasks and consider whether service-level agreements (SLAs) need to be monitored for follow-up actions or remediation.
Clearly establish the criteria for when an incident is considered closed, and ensure this is incorporated into your automation playbooks. If incidents are closed on external systems, include this as a final step. Identify points in the workflow where an analyst may need to intervene and make decisions, and build these decision points into the automation process.
While starting small can deliver quick wins that justify initial investments, achieving meaningful digital transformation in your SOC requires strong stakeholder support. Successful XSOAR users who transform their SOCs dedicate resources to empowering their teams, driving automation initiatives, and identifying key areas where automation can serve as a strategic business enabler. Gaining a champion within your organization helps build momentum, secure necessary buy-in, and sustain long-term progress in your automation journey.
Investing in cybersecurity automation training is necessary for organizations navigating today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. As traditional, manual approaches to cybersecurity become increasingly inadequate, security professionals must be equipped with the skills and knowledge to leverage the benefits of automation fully.
Automation provides significant advantages, including:
This is particularly critical given the widening skills gap in cybersecurity. With a shortage of qualified professionals, automation helps alleviate the resource strain by enabling existing staff to handle a broader range of tasks more efficiently and effectively, thereby preventing burnout and maximizing productivity.
What Is Automation?
“It's a very hard thing to answer. I mean, obviously it’s taking care of something automatically—but [it doesn’t] live in any one place. And that’s what makes it hard to answer. So, a lot of people think about, you know, the alert pipeline or the IR [incident response] process as a very linear stage of steps, right? Automation plays a role in that, in multiple places ... And then we’re also automating processes in and around the SOC itself so certain procedures are being handled behind the scenes and don’t need to be handled by our SOC analysts. That can be governance or audit-related, notifications and alerts of, you know, program or platform health. Automation to us generally is in service of expediting the time to resolve and increasing the clarity and confidence we have in the conclusions that we reach.”
- Kyle Kennedy, Senior Staff Security Engineer, Palo Alto Networks
Clear and well-defined use cases are essential for effective automation. This process begins by identifying repetitive tasks, understanding critical business processes, and pinpointing specific pain points where automation can deliver the most value.
Involve key stakeholders across departments, such as security, operations, and compliance teams, to provide input on existing processes and identify areas ripe for automation. Analyze data to prioritize use cases based on their potential impact and ease of integration.
Evaluate each use case's security and compliance implications. Select automation tools that align with the organization's regulatory requirements and security standards, ensuring the solution meets operational and compliance needs.
Develop and test prototypes to validate the feasibility of each use case. Calculate the return on investment (ROI) by assessing the potential time savings, cost reductions, and efficiency gains. Use these insights to create a roadmap for full-scale implementation.
Maintain thorough documentation for each use case, outlining objectives, processes, and expected outcomes. Continuously monitor the performance of automated workflows, making adjustments as needed to optimize effectiveness and maintain alignment with organizational goals.
Defining automation use cases is about strategically identifying where automation can improve efficiency and effectiveness while ensuring alignment with organizational goals and compliance requirements. This structured approach helps ensure that automation initiatives produce tangible benefits and contribute to overall operational excellence.
To avoid scope creep—a common challenge in automation projects—it is vital to establish a clear and precise definition for each use case. This involves setting specific objectives and boundaries from the outset, such as automating incident response for targeted threats like phishing emails. A well-defined use case scope keeps automation efforts focused, manageable, and effective, preventing unnecessary complexity and feature additions.
Moreover, a clear scope allows for better risk assessment and management. By understanding the boundaries of each use case, potential risks can be identified early, and mitigation strategies can be planned accordingly.
This approach helps prevent the unintended introduction of security vulnerabilities or compliance issues, ensuring that automation enhances rather than compromises the organization's security posture.
Phishing and malware are two of the most prevalent security threats, making them ideal starting points for developing automation use cases. Organizations can customize playbooks for these scenarios to address their specific requirements, using them as templates for building tailored solutions.
Insight: According to the 2022 Unit 42 Incident Response Report, 77% of intrusions are suspected to originate from three primary access vectors: phishing, exploitation of known software vulnerabilities, and brute-force credential attacks — primarily targeting remote desktop protocol (RDP).
The Cortex Marketplace offers over 1,000 content packs of prebuilt playbooks and integrations with security and non-security tools used in the SOC. These resources are crafted from extensive research, practical experience, customer feedback, and usage data, providing a wide range of options likely to meet your organization’s needs.
The Cortex Marketplace content is continuously updated to reflect emerging industry trends and user feedback. By sharing insights and experiences, organizations can contribute to the evolution of security automation, helping to shape future tools and playbooks that address the latest threats and challenges.
Choosing the right SOAR platform is crucial for achieving efficient security automation. The ideal platform should enable quick implementation with ready-to-use playbooks and support scalability as your organization’s security needs evolve. This includes integrating advanced capabilities such as threat intelligence and seamlessly orchestrating workflows across your entire security toolset, various functional teams, and distributed networks.
Additionally, the platform should integrate with external threat intelligence sources to provide real-time visibility into threats, helping your organization stay ahead of emerging risks.
SOAR platforms integrate with existing security tools through APIs and pre-built connectors. The steps typically include:
Common challenges in SOAR deployment include:
The success of a SOAR deployment can be measured using several key metrics:
These metrics help to quantify the improvements and justify the investment in a SOAR platform.
