How to Improve SOC Productivity with Omnis Cyber Intelligence and Splunk

The security operations center (SOC) is the backbone of any network security team in an organization. Ensuring this team is productive in their investigations is key to running an efficient cybersecurity program. 

Many large enterprises, however, experience growing pains in their cyber organization as they acquire additional entities and spread their footprint across multiple locations. These growing pains can be caused by existing implementations of various security tools, including endpoint detection and response (EDR), network detection and response (NDR), extended detection and response (XDR), security information and event management (SIEM), and more that do not integrate well together. This creates a siloed cyber alert organization structure due to differing user interfaces (UIs) and alert delivery methods across these solutions. 

Having different solutions in place across locations requires each SOC analyst to have access to and knowledge of each UI in order to monitor and respond to all alerts in a timely manner, creating friction in the process of logging issues in the alert ticketing system. It also creates delays in the verification of alerts when confirming whether they are legitimate or false positives. The key to avoiding this issue is integration between platforms to have a consistent data source and mode of delivery across the entire network.

SOC Productivity Solution

One solution to this challenge is to integrate an advanced NDR solution, such as NETSCOUT Omnis Cyber Intelligence (OCI), with a powerful SIEM platform, such as Splunk Enterprise Security, to aid in the verification and consolidation of alerts. Splunk Enterprise Security allows users to combine several security tools into a single dashboard, while OCI delivers packet-level evidence for each alert or incident.

The intelligence provided by OCI is powered by network packet data, providing consistent and detailed information to assist SecOps teams. This consolidated intelligence helps expedite response times to resolve cyberthreats faster and more easily. The integration between OCI and Splunk is fully tested and documented, allowing for fast times to deployment with minimal resources and a proven connection between the two powerful platforms, making it possible for SecOps teams to perform more work with less effort than by using separate solutions. The single-pane-of-glass view provided by this integration compiles all pertinent data in one location to create operational efficiencies.

How It Works

Consolidating threat data into a single dashboard via the Splunk/OIC solution makes it easier for SOC teams to investigate and analyze security alerts. To build on this, analysts can leverage automation to remove unnecessary information from the alerts and streamline the dataset as well as to normalize data so that all information is presented in a consistent format—further easing issue analysis. IT teams can combine this dataset with automated searching within OCI to uncover packet-level insights for each security event in a timely manner. These dashboards also can be modified to allow for the automatic creation of trouble tickets in the system to flag relevant threats for escalation.

Increasing SOC Productivity

This solution has been shown to eliminate a majority of issues associated with manual trouble ticket creation. It does this by removing a degree of human error as well as automating the process to include the most important information in the ticket. The solution improves workflows by properly linking directly to the source of the data to help improve the time it takes to determine if an alert is legitimate or a false positive. The integrated solution created by combining OCI and Splunk can help reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) by upwards of 75 percent, reducing downtime and outages that can cost enterprises tens of thousands of dollars per hour in lost revenue.

Increasing SOC productivity can pay dividends in terms of return on investment (ROI) when compared with the revenue-loss risk associated with major outages as the result of a cyberattack. Equipping your security teams to better handle threat alerts in a timely manner allows enterprises to discount false positives more effectively, increasing the time spent focusing on real threats and removing bad actors from networks before an outage occurs.

The NETSCOUT and Splunk Integration

NETSCOUT is a Splunk Elite Build partner and holds a Cloud Migration: Co-Delivery badge. This integration between NETSCOUT and Splunk brings NetOps and SecOps teams together with a combined view of security and network events, including those from OCI, in the Splunk SIEM portal. The partnership allows users to query back to OCI when contextual alerts are triggered in the Splunk dashboards, allowing security teams to quickly and effectively dive into alerts and solve problems faster.

Learn more about the OCI and Splunk integration in the NETSCOUT case study “Improving SOC Productivity with Splunk and NETSCOUT OCI.”