My company has two use cases for Splunk SOAR. We use it to enrich alarms by pulling in outside sources of information. Splunk can also automate actions while ensuring they are structured and reproducible.
With SOAR, you build a workflow, so you think ahead about all the steps that can be automated for a specific type of investigation. You need to do a decent amount of work in advance so that it does exactly what you tell it to. We need to gather a lot of essential details for our incidents. For example, if we're investigating a suspicious email, we need to gather a lot of information about who the user is.
We can enrich alerts by pulling in more information about each user. We can see their locations, roles, etc. Having that knowledge may influence our decisions or analysis. We can also submit files to be reviewed and get the results. It's akin to a doctor ordering diagnostic testing. The doctor can use the results to make decisions.
Splunk has benefited us from that perspective, but it takes some effort upfront to think about the flow and build it out. It reduces some of our manual research by offering additional context for events. I can pull the files, automatically submit them to a sandbox, have it run, and get the results from the sandbox. I don't have to notify one of my engineers and tell them to get this file I submitted to the sandbox.
It also improves ticketing because we can notify users when suspicious emails are quarantined and ensure a ticket is associated with it. We constantly track the work. We can close the ticket when the issue is resolved and release the email if it's legitimate. Splunk helps us document the entire process.
Splunk reduced our detection time a little by helping us quickly differentiate between an actual event and a false alarm. I don't view SOAR as a detection mechanism in itself. The events still occur. It helps enrich alerts so we can distinguish between actual events and noise.
For every event, it saves the responding staffer about 15 to 20 minutes because they need to do less data entry. They need to do the research and follow our procedure for a ticket. It takes time to assign a ticket and make entries. Finally, they need to perform an assessment and close the ticket.
Splunk SOAR frees up our staff to work on other things to a degree. There is always more than enough work, and somehow the volume still feels like it's always crazy. Still, it allows people to do some other tasks. It will enable my engineers to focus on more thought-provoking problems instead of menial tasks. I want them to spend time learning the underlying mechanism in case SOAR goes down.
If Splunk is unavailable for whatever reason, I always want to have someone who understands the mechanics of what it does. At the same time, it improves retention if you can eliminate some mind-numbing work and allow them to focus on challenging items. Your employees will be happier in general. They can do some more unusual, engaging work that enables them to learn and grow.
We couldn't consolidate any tools by using Splunk SOAR because everything was manual before we implemented it. We didn't have an automation tool.
I like the way Splunk interacts with various systems via the API. The ability to integrate Splunk with our ticketing system has been an immense help because we can maintain our workflow while blending Splunk with our support desk and other ways that we track work.
Sometimes we flag events based on conditions in the app or service that is sending us the feed, and we focused on a couple. We get some normal events, but we also see some security issues occasionally in the same feed. I don't know if they injected this or if this was the first time we saw it. There was another type that was security-related, but we didn't know about it before.
We have playbooks written to extract these events and put them into the workflow since it wasn't structured as expected. It was a miss for us. We couldn't figure out why it broke or what actually happened there. It was something in this feed with legitimate and security events, so we tried to understand the names and what we would call them.
It was a unique time. That goes back to an inability to detect these kinds of events. API documentation is typically a weak spot. Many vendors focus on the product first and save the API information for the very last.
Splunk's integration isn't bad. However, it comes down to which APIs are available. For example, I would like to automate file extraction, and a particular vendor seems to have an API that should do that, but I can't. You're at the mercy of the vendors. While APIs probably leverage more than ever, it's still like pulling teeth to get some vendors to support it correctly. Nevertheless, it's highly beneficial when it works.
Depending on the playbook, it can sometimes get a little crazy and overwhelming, but I think it's generally okay.
I have used Splunk SOAR for about a year.
Splunk is relatively stable. We had an issue early on. It was a bug. Splunk sorted it out. Our uptime has been consistent.
We haven't had any issues with scalability.
It took a little time before we realized Splunk SOAR's value. I have one engineer who dedicated himself to building many of our playbooks and a lot of the automation that we have. Another engineer is only starting out.
You need to have the right mindset so that you don't get scope creep. It's critical to manage what you want to do because you're dealing with a blank slate. There are costs like computation time, but it's relatively straightforward. You need to be thoughtful and take your time to do everything in small chunks. It took us a while to get going with SOAR because we have to integrate our devices. It isn't a turnkey solution.
I don't remember Splunk SOAR's price off the top of my head. Still, I believe it was a solid value because of the time saved, consistent results that are reproducible, integration with multiple systems, etc. The benefits justify the cost.
We didn't seriously consider other options. We looked at what was happening in our environment, and our SIEM is a hub for our security operations. Palo Alto is another vendor we use, so we briefly looked at their SOAR solution. However, it wasn't in the right position to work with the Splunk piece. Splunk gathers all the log material. We can act on that and interface with all of our key security devices because they have rich associations with multiple security vendors. It made more sense for us to focus on that.
I rate Splunk SOAR a nine out of ten. If you're thinking about implementing the solution, you should consider which events will save you the most time. Think about the procedures you're following today and where you can benefit the most from automation.
The second piece is thinking about the other solutions involved and the capabilities they offer. Do you have the API access to automate what you want? Your success depends on those vendors and sorting that stuff out. You must also approach your SOAR playbooks and workflows in a modular way. Don't try to handle everything upfront.
It's best to automate piece by piece. You don't need to tackle an entire ecosystem right off the bat. Take what you can and constantly improve it as you grow more comfortable. Splunk SOAR's strength comes from its interactions with other systems. Ensure that you're fully leveraging that.