Automated playbooks have transformed incident response and now protect critical servicesThe biggest advantage I see from my personal experience as an integrator with Splunk SOAR is that it integrates with most of the security features among the Defenders, Microsoft Defender, firewalls, CloudWatch, and AWS security agents, as well as EC2 machines, firewalls, EDR, IAM, email security, and antivirus. It automates the security process over phishing emails and any other brute force attacks. It helps quite a lot because if 100 phishing emails were sent to a domain, a developer can only reach one, two, or five, but for hundreds of others, it actually supports better automated playbooks and provides major security. Splunk SOAR introduced some new and innovative capabilities or approaches that transformed the way my SOC operates. Splunk SOAR provides playbooks for automatic security features, such as for firewalls, phishing mails, and utilizing Defenders or virtual tools. A playbook maintains its algorithms or processes, so if any kind of security issue arises, the playbook automatically runs and handles actions such as IP blocking or resolving brute force attacks, notifying the admin about suspicious users. After implementing Splunk SOAR, the training process for my SOC team to use playbooks takes a long time during the whole integration part, as it retrieves all credentials from us, whether for an EC2 machine or any antivirus. It takes about one to two months for the team to fully sustain and know the processes of the playbooks and security, particularly for three or four individuals in the cyber security or DevOps team. Splunk SOAR significantly reduces the time spent on monotonous security tasks. In banking, insurance, or healthcare, automated services for addressing phishing emails and security threats are common. Having a manual workforce of two or three individuals can only handle five or ten security threats while Splunk SOAR automates the entire process across apps and machines, making it easier and notifying the admin about the threats. If someone tries to breach, Splunk SOAR immediately processes incoming requests, validating them and blocking any unsecured requests, which reduces a lot of time and effort. With the help of the playbook viewer, I assess the visibility provided by Splunk SOAR as very positive, especially for security purposes. If someone is attacked by 100 users, it blocks all the users, while individual developers such as myself can only handle two or three at a time. The automated process of Splunk SOAR handles all the processes concurrently, making it a game-changing solution. It helps reduce mean time to resolve (MTTR). It takes around 10 to 20 minutes to resolve one incident through the whole process and notify the admin of the issue. If there are multiple incidents, calculating the time taken for each, it generally requires around 40 to 50 minutes to resolve five incidents.
