Unveiling the Power of Automation for MSSPs

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This blog written by Bar Katzir on March 1, 2024.

Managed security service providers (MSSPs) face the same problems as any security operations team: disparate tools, siloed data sources and inconsistent processes.

However, these challenges are amplified across dozens of customers, inhibiting growth and cutting into revenue margins for the MSSP business.

Automation can become the great equalizer for MSSP SOC teams challenged with scaling incident coverage and speed of response with limited staff. By eliminating duplicate alerts, false positives and manual, repetitive tasks, automation liberates SOC teams to focus on what’s critical and complex enough to require human intervention. The SOC analysts also realize a better work-life balance, are relieved from constant fire-fighting, and less prone to burnout.

A recent study by ESG¹ has identified multiple opportunities for MSSPs to apply automation to improve security outcomes and operations within their teams and for their clients.

Fig 1: SOC metrics Impacted by automation

According to ESG, those leveraging security process automation report benefits such as improved threat detection using playbooks (51% of respondents), mean time to respond (49% of respondents), and incident prioritization (44% of respondents), as well as an ability to more quickly isolate infected assets (44% of respondents).

Automation Challenges Create Opportunities for MSSPs

While security process automation is acknowledged as a need, many organizations face challenges. According to the same study, nearly 2 in 5 organizations (39%) claim that their security operations team doesn’t have the right programming skills to develop playbooks in SOAR tools, while 21% claim that their security operations processes are immature and are in need of reengineering before they can be automated. In these cases, organizations need more help to assess process workflows, look for bottlenecks, before moving on to automation.

The ESG study also noted that purchasing security operations tools designed to help automate and orchestrate security operations processes tops the list of actions organizations plan to take to improve their security operations. MSSPs are in a great position to follow this important trend to meet customer objectives while scaling their own internal operations.

“46% of midsize companies rank SOAR as their top requirement in security operations technologies”

Introducing Cortex XSOAR 8 for MSSPs

Cortex XSOAR is a flexible and scalable security orchestration, automation and response platform that serves security services providers of all sizes, from SOC teams with several people to globally distributed teams with hundreds of analysts.

Our most recent XSOAR 8 SaaS offering provides a scalable and easy-to-manage way for MSSPs to deploy and use XSOAR:

Scalable Deployment

The offering is designed to be scalable, so MSSPs can easily add or remove tenants as needed. This makes it a cost-effective solution for MSSPs that need to support a large number of customers.

Easy Tenant Management

The offering also makes it easy for MSSPs to manage their tenants. Each tenant can be configured with its own set of playbooks, integrations, pre and post processing rules, etc. This allows MSSPs to customize XSOAR for each customer's specific needs.

Data Separation
The offering allows the MSSP to access and operate on child-tenant incidents and indicators from the main account, while each child-tenant data is stored and encrypted in a separate Google Cloud project using its own symmetric encryption key.

Custom Content Management (Dev-Prod/External CI/CD)

MSSP can use a content management system with a private content repository to develop and test content. By setting out this flow, MSSP’s have flexibility and granular control over the content(playbooks, integrations, etc) deployed at the end-customer tenants.

Benefits of XSOAR for MSSPs

In addition to the aforementioned benefits, XSOAR offers a number of other benefits for MSSPs, including:

• Automated incident response: XSOAR can automate many of the tasks involved in incident response, such as triaging alerts, investigating incidents, and remediating threats. This frees up MSSP security teams to focus on more strategic tasks.
• Improved collaboration: XSOAR provides a centralized platform for collaboration between MSSPs and their customers. This helps to ensure that everyone is working together effectively to respond to incidents.
• Increased visibility: XSOAR provides a single view of all security events across an organization. This helps MSSPs to identify and respond to threats more quickly.
• Reduced costs: XSOAR can help MSSPs to reduce their operational costs by automating tasks and improving efficiency.

Conclusion

The XSOAR MSSP SaaS offering is a powerful tool that can help MSSPs to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their security operations. The scalable deployment and easy tenant management make it a cost-effective and easy-to-use solution for MSSPs of all sizes.

“The digital world is constantly changing. We help our customers to secure and optimize their data and digital services in these challenging times. We leverage XSOAR to optimize operational efficiency within our Cyber Command Center, to augment and empower our analysts so we can provide 100% consistency and precision in delivering security services.

Our decision to partner with XSOAR was due to the flexibility of the platform coupled with ease of use and maintenance as the XSOAR 8 SaaS solution removed a lot of the backend platform maintenance work. We also felt we could depend on Palo Alto Networks track record for security”

— Peter Van Hoorenbeeck, Co-Founder and Cyber Command Center Lead, Davinsi Labs.