What is SOC Automation? Improving Security Workflows and Processes

In 2019, Sans reported that a lack of automation was the second biggest challenge faced by SOCs. Today, within security operation centers (SOCs), analysts still spend a substantial amount of time and effort on manual processes such as log analysis, event correlation, and incident investigation.

Unfortunately, this manual approach hinders their ability to swiftly detect and respond to security incidents. It also introduces inconsistencies in incident response, as different analysts may interpret and handle events differently. To address these challenges, automation has become a necessary solution.

What is SOC Automation? 

The rise of SOC automation has been driven by the need for more efficient, accurate, and scalable security operations. It involves the implementation of automated operations within a SOC to replace manual workflows and streamline threat detection and response processes. For example, with event collection and alert generation, data is collected from multiple sources, integrated, and filtered based on predefined rules. Automated analysis identifies patterns and anomalies, generating alerts when specific events or thresholds are met. By automating tasks such as these, security teams can achieve the overall key benefits of SOC automation, including: 

• Enhanced efficiency and speed: Automation eliminates the need for repetitive and time-consuming manual tasks. By streamlining processes, it allows analysts to focus on more critical and complex activities. This improves operational efficiency and accelerates response times to security incidents. 
• Improved accuracy and consistency: By using predefined rules and workflows, automation minimizes human error, leading to more accurate analysis and investigation and reducing mistakes and inconsistencies. Automation also ensures standardized incident response, reducing variations in decision-making and response strategies. 
• Increased scalability: As security threats continue to evolve and increase in volume, automation enables security operations teams to handle larger workloads and scale their operations effectively. 
• Enhanced threat detection: Automation improves threat detection by continuously monitoring and analyzing security events. It can detect overlooked anomalies and trends, allowing for early detection of potential security incidents and enhancing overall threat detection capabilities. 
• Reduced burnout: Automation relieves analysts of high-time, low-brain tasks, reducing the likelihood of burnout and enabling analysts to apply their skills where they matter most. 

 

What Are SOC Automation Use Cases? 

To enhance security operations, it’s important to identify the most suitable automation use cases. By doing so, analysts can successfully implement automation in key areas, improving response efforts and strengthening the overall security posture of an organization. Below, we’ve listed out our top five recommended use cases for SOC automation: 

1. Threat detection: Automatically deploying detections across an environment can protect from potential threats or vulnerabilities. For example, deploying detections to endpoint detection and response (EDR) technology allows for detection of attacks such as malware and ransomware, fileless attacks, suspicious processes, anomalous network traffic, data exfiltration, and insider threats.

2. Alert triage: Automation streamlines alert triaging by enabling real-time analysis, classification, and prioritization of alerts, eliminating false positives, and allowing analysts to focus on genuine threats. It ensures consistency, scales operations efficiently, integrates with security tools for context, and reduces alert fatigue.

3. Analysis: SOC automation streamlines data aggregation, correlation, and normalization, freeing up analysts to focus on containment and remediation. For example, applying automation to phishing email analysis can help categorize suspicious emails, reducing analyst workload. It quickly analyzes email headers, links, and attachments to identify potential phishing attempts and alerts the security team promptly.

4. Threat hunting: Security teams can utilize automated processes for data collection, enrichment, and performing queries using specialized threat hunting packages. These automated techniques enable security teams to quickly gather relevant data, enhance its context, and execute targeted queries for efficient threat detection and response.

5. Response actions: Security teams can develop automated response actions, such as blocking an IP, banning a hash, or deleting a potentially harmful phishing emails rather than logging into the separate tools to do it manually. These automated responses can be further optimized by configuring them to trigger based on predefined conditions to expedite response times.

What Is the Role of AI in SOC Automation? 

While some may use the terms automation and AI interchangeably, it’s important to recognize that AI extends beyond automation as with agentic and generative AI for example and offers complementary advantages. For example, AI plays a supporting role in collecting behavioral analytics, anomaly detection, data summarization, and decision-making for alerts.

Behavioral analytics involves AI analyzing patterns and gaining insights into human and system behavior. By utilizing machine learning algorithms, AI continuously learns and adapts to evolving patterns of normal behavior, enabling the identification of suspicious activities and anomalies. 

AI can assist with anomaly detection by processing large volumes of data and identifying deviations from expected behavior, including previously unknown or zero-day threats. 

AI also excels in data summarization by extracting relevant information from extensive datasets. This capability empowers security teams to focus on critical areas without being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data. By providing insights and recommendations for alert prioritization, AI assists in decision-making, reducing alert fatigue for security analysts. 

Does Automation and AI Replace Analysts? 

No. The collaborative approach between AI, automation, and human interaction ensures that human expertise remains paramount while also being enhanced. Rather than replacing human analysts, the integration of AI and automation aims to complement their capabilities, enabling them to concentrate on higher-priority tasks. 

Where Do Organizations Begin When Adopting SOC Automation? 

While all organizations benefit from automation, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to automation for every SOC. Each organization has unique needs, challenges, and resources that must be considered to develop an effective automation strategy. To help get started, here are key steps to guide the adoption of SOC automation that can be tailored to their specific needs: 

• Analyze top alerts and incidents: Identify the most frequent and critical alerts and incidents encountered in the last year.  By identifying these, security teams can better understand where automation can have the greatest impact.  

• Identify risk tolerance and objectives: Organizations should begin by defining their risk tolerance and understanding the business impact of potential automations. This ensures that automation efforts align with business objectives and that the organization is comfortable with the level of risk involved.  

• Develop a detection library: Create a library of customized detection rules and signatures tailored to the organization’s specific threat landscape. This library should be continuously updated based on the latest threat intelligence and incident data. Once developed, centralize the coordination and management of it through detection orchestration.  

• Develop response playbooks: Develop a comprehensive library of playbooks to ensure consistent and swift automated responses to minimize potential damage. They should include predefined actions to the top alerts and incidents identified. These playbooks should be regularly updated to ensure they remain effective.  

• Monitor for continuous improvement: Regularly evaluate performance to identify gaps and areas for improvement. Document and measure key metrics like response time reductions, error rates, and incident handling to continuously update and optimize your automated security operations. 

generation but lack the capabilities required for comprehensive incident response and workflow automation. EDR tools are excellent for endpoint threat monitoring and response but are limited in full SOC automation due to their endpoint-specific focus. 

Given this, SOAR solutions and security operations platforms are recommended for end-to-end automation. To determine which is a better fit for your organization is dependent on the use cases you intend to use them for.  

Should SOAR Solutions Be Used for SOC Automation? 

SOAR tools are commonly used to achieve automation through a proprietary technology stack, integrating data and streamlining operations between tools in an environment. 

Building and maintaining automation workflows is where SOAR solutions typically fall short. Security teams must carefully plan, design, and integrate systems and tools to meet an organization’s specific needs. Ongoing efforts are required to monitor, troubleshoot, and update the workflows as threats evolve and new technologies emerge. Unfortunately, this can divert security teams’ efforts towards maintaining the SOAR solution instead of focusing on other important tasks. This is why SOAR solutions are best suited for use cases like ticketing workflows and business process automations.

How Can a Security Operations Platform Automate SOC Workflows?

A comprehensive security operations platform provides a holistic approach to security operations, integrating with various security tools and systems. It offers a central hub that not only facilitates automation but also provides capabilities for threat detection, incident response, collaboration, and reporting. 

By utilizing a security operations platform, security teams can leverage automation capabilities without being overly burdened by the maintenance and upkeep. They can rely on the platform to handle the complexities of integrating and orchestrating different technologies and systems, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks.

What’s the Future of SOC Automation? 

The future of SOC automation is being shaped by technologies like generative AI and agentic AI. These advancements promise to transform SOCs into highly efficient, proactive, and intelligent security operations, capable of autonomously managing threats and continuously improving their security posture. Hyperautomation, in particular, plays a crucial role by integrating various automation technologies to create an end-to-end automated security environment, enhancing threat detection and response, and overall operational efficiency. 

Why ReliaQuest GreyMatter for SOC Automation? 

By leveraging a comprehensive platform that integrates seamlessly with your existing technologies, you can elevate your detection and response capabilities while relieving your team from repetitive and time-consuming security tasks. The ReliaQuest GreyMatter security operations platform uses cutting edge automation and technologies to collect and translate data from your existing endpoint, network, and cloud security stack, no matter where those tools live. It pairs data collection and analysis technology with powerful automation, driving better overall SOC efficiency to better respond to threats and mitigate risks. Request a personalized GreyMatter demo to discover how we can help strengthen your security posture.