Organizations are facing many challenges to secure their IT infrastructure, business services, and user data. When it comes to attacks, security teams find it difficult to zero in on the type and source of threats. The manual process for risk mitigation and vulnerability assessment decreases efficiency. This calls for an IT infrastructure reinforcement to detect and remediate the attacks and vulnerabilities at an early stage, reducing any potential business risk.
So where does ServiceNow, a cloud-based platform, fit in the security landscape? The ServiceNow solution stack for security operations helps organizations rebuild their security processes on their cloud-based platform. Proven benefits for replacing manual tasks with automated security orchestration are:
- Improved speed and efficiency of the security response: automation and orchestration reduce the time spent on basic tasks.
- Easy connect between security and IT with a single platform across IT, security, and the business to quickly detect, prioritize, and remediate any risks.
- Role-based dashboards and reporting with performance analytics enhance the view of security posture and team performance.
According to Gartner, “By year-end 2022, 30% of organizations with a security team larger than five people will leverage SOAR tools in their security operations, up from less than 5% today.”
SOAR, which stands for Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response, is a solution stack that helps an organization in collecting data about security threats from multiple sources and automatically remediate low-level threats without human intervention. ServiceNow is also represented as a SOAR solution vendor that helps in resolving security incidents and vulnerabilities at a quicker pace.
Here are a few use cases pertaining to the workflows and automation of Security Operations for faster security response.
Automating threat analysis
In case of suspicion, a new security incident is created. This triggers several parallel workflows to identify the details of this suspicious file. The extracted information is sent back in seconds to be displayed on the security incident record.
Phishing response and remediation
Phishing is the most common type of targeted attack. Employees in the organization experience such attacks through emails. Once reported to the anti-phishing team of the organization, a security incident is created. The information extracted is analyzed and checked for the impacted assets and areas. Other emails from the same source of attack are automatically blocked and removed from the server. After the incident is resolved, a report with all the information is auto-generated.
Responding to misconfigured software
Misconfigured software leaves the doors open for attackers. This may include incorrect permissions, weak passwords, access controls, and more. A policy is made to define correct and secure configurations. Then the assessment tool tests the software for the configurations. The misconfigurations are identified and prioritized based on the risk score. Depending on the priority, failures are addressed, and a follow-up scan confirms the fix.
Addressing a high-profile vulnerability
If simultaneously two cases of vulnerabilities are triggered, depending on the risk actor, the priority is decided. All the information related to the vulnerability (e.g., what it is, how it’s exploited, and how to remediate the threat) is automatically pulled into Vulnerability Response without any human intervention. The second scan cycle confirms the fix.
Managing routine vulnerability scan results
As a standard security practice, vulnerability scans are routinely performed in organizations to detect vulnerabilities, threats, and malware. This helps in determining the risk exposure of the organization and the vulnerabilities that can badly impact business can be quickly detected and fixed.
Improving security visibility
Performance analytics dashboards by ServiceNow Security Operations help in security assessment with the time to identify, contain, and eradicate security incidents. The data represented on this dashboard is extracted from actual incident records. It also gives the visibility to track security with statistical data, including open incidents by priority, or open critical vulnerabilities.
Calsoft is a ServiceNow Technology Partner and has delivered plug-ins for seamless integration of ServiceNow solutions in security operations with third-party tools and software. ServiceNow security solutions are transforming inefficient processes by aligning security, IT, and risk capabilities. ServiceNow was also named as a leader in the July 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integrated Risk Management.
References:
https://www.servicenow.com/products/security-operations.html
