Playbooks — and automated processes in general — were once primarily associated with security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platforms, but that has changed recently. Many modern security information and event management (SIEM) solutions have started incorporating SOAR-like functionality, enabling you to automate security workflows and improve your mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR).
This shift results from SOC analysts dealing with a plethora of repetitive, manual tasks across multiple applications, which causes context switching, analyst fatigue, and hampers security teams’ efficiency and productivity. To prevent this, you need to streamline threat management by handling event management, event analysis, threat detection, and incident response from one centralized platform. A modern, cloud-native SIEM tool with rich automation capabilities solves that need.
With our Cloud SIEM Automation Service, you can speed up security investigations with Cloud SIEM playbooks and improve your security incident response.
Understanding modern SIEM tools
Modern SIEM solutions blur the line between traditional SIEM and SOAR tools by integrating security automation and orchestration capabilities directly into the platform. Analysts and industry leaders, such as Gartner, emphasize built-in SOAR-like capabilities as essential to modern SIEM effectiveness.
A key feature is the graphical playbook editor that enables security teams to create and customize incident response playbooks without coding. These SOAR playbooks automate typical steps in a security investigation triggered by SIEM alerts, reducing manual intervention and minimizing context switching between tools such as Microsoft Sentinel or Microsoft Defender.
What is the Cloud SIEM Automation Service?
The Cloud SIEM Automation Service enables you to create, customize, and use fully automated workflows, or playbooks, including enrichment and notification actions. It allows you to promptly investigate suspicious activity or potential security threats, notify relevant team members, and enhance your threat response.
Playbooks can be activated manually or automatically based on triggers, like the creation of a new Insight.
The Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Automation Service has out-of-the-box playbooks you can customize in its graphical editor. You can also build new playbooks from scratch without coding, creating workflows consisting of the following five types of nodes:
- Enrichment
- Notification
- Custom action
- Nested playbook
- Machine choice (automated conditionals forking into different directions hinging on the outcomes of previous nodes)
Besides playbooks and a playbook editor, the Automation Service gives you access to the Open Integration Framework (OIF) and hundreds of pre-built integrations with services as diverse as AWS, Recorded Future, Jira, ChatGPT, and more. The sheer number of integrations implies a high probability that you will find the tools you need in your cyber environment.
But even if a security tool is missing, you can still customize the current integrations. Just like playbooks, you can build your own integrations from the ground up and fill any existing gaps. You can also ask the Sumo Logic team to develop new integrations without incurring additional charges.
Benefits of using the Cloud SIEM Automation Service
The Cloud SIEM Automation Service helps you address the following pain points:
- Overextended threat intelligence cycle due to the lack of automated alert enrichment capabilities
- Overly long threat investigation
- Lack of alert contextualization and prioritization
- Missing automated or centralized notification mechanisms that slow down a security team’s or SOC’s (security operations center) response
- Poorly integrated security stack
Structured processes for efficient security investigation
The Automation Service allows you to investigate potential threats through structured processes embodied in enrichment and notification playbooks. They enable the automatic enrichment of alerts with information from internal sources (e.g., historical data in a data lake) or external sources (third-party products and services).
The Cloud SIEM playbooks provide clear context so a security analyst can properly and quickly evaluate alerts, reliably determine whether they are false or true positives, and act accordingly. In short, structured enrichment and notification processes turn security investigation into a much more efficient process.
Integration and automation for a highly integrated security stack
Security stacks inevitably include a range of disparate technologies, where tools with overlapping features are often utilized for the same tasks. Poorly integrated tool stacks severely affect productivity, efficiency, and analyst engagement, preventing teams from optimizing their work. For this reason, the ability to easily incorporate different technologies and make them work in unison has become vital to your security and SOC team.
By taking advantage of the integration and automation capabilities of the Cloud SIEM Automation Service, you can operate even the most complex security stacks from a single place. The Cloud SIEM Automation Service allows disparate tools to collaborate in an automated workflow, enabling you to gain better control over your security operations.
Insights and playbooks for reliable alert prioritization
Cloud SIEM Insights provide an excellent ground for alert prioritization, but the Automation Service refines the process even further. It allows you to adjust alert severity and prioritize Insights even more efficiently based on the results of the run playbooks. When a Cloud SIEM playbook runs, you obtain all the relevant data to differentiate between Insights and focus primarily on those that point to the most urgent cyber threats.
Real-world use cases: Examples of Sumo Logic SIEM playbooks
Cloud SIEM playbooks range from simple to complex:
- A simple playbook might query a threat intelligence service for an IP address and automatically create a Jira ticket.
- A complex playbook might include a set of actions that involve logic, such as looking up an IP address and, if it is malicious, sending an email and increasing the severity of the Insight. Another example would be a playbook performing enrichment for multiple entities — one ”path“ for each Entity type — and then checking for maliciousness for any of them.
Final word
With Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Automation Service, your organization gains a powerful security automation platform, helping your SOC team and security analysts focus on proactive threat hunting and incident response, rather than manual alert handling.
Want to see it in action? Sign up for a demo.
