Many organisations are seeking to lessen the impact of the cybersecurity skills gap by increasing the productivity of their existing staff. Incident response orchestration can help.
Response orchestration provides guided response – ensuring analysts know what they need to do and when to do it, and are armed with the intelligence and tools to do so. As a result, analysts react and resolve incidents faster, and junior analysts can respond like more senior analysts.
In our recent webinar, “How to alleviate the security skills gap through IR orchestration” – featuring guest speaker Joseph Blankenship, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research – we outlined real-world examples of how organisations use IR orchestration to improve their teams across all levels, from analysts to the C-suite.
If you missed the webinar, here are three ways your organisation can start to orchestrate its response processes to help beat the skills gap:
Streamline repetitive triage tasks
Analysts are bogged down – and, often, burnt out – by having to manually investigate the thousands of security events that organisations face daily. In the triage phase of response, analysts spend hours querying and pulling reports from disparate systems. This limits productivity and increases staff fatigue and turnover.
Security managers can combat this by automating many of the basic and time-consuming investigative tasks repeated daily. This not only improves staff efficiency and effectiveness, but enables analysts to focus on more strategic – and meaningful – tasks.
Develop a structure for reporting, assessment, and improvement
With an incident response platform (IRP), IR managers can structure response phases and associated reporting. This enables them to measure their team’s performance, identify bottlenecks, and uncover opportunities for professional development. For example, if certain teams or team members consistently take longer in the detect/analyse phase, they might need training on how to use threat intelligence feeds or other enrichment controls more effectively.
With this data easily accessible, IR managers can modify processes and develop workshops to foster the professional development of their existing staff.
Educate the C-suite
In addition to reporting on team performance, orchestrating response with an IRP can also help security managers give insight to the C-level about the state of their organisation’s global security function. It can do so by centralising security and incident response activity from around the world into a single view.
By creating globally focused KPIs and reports for the C-suite, security leaders can unlock new conversations about bigger change within the security function. This creates awareness about specific skills gap needs and helps justify budget and staffing allocations. For example, if phishing incidents spike out of India, this provides a great opportunity to justify anti-phishing training and education in the region.
