New Year, New SOC — 2022 is the Year for Integrated Intelligence

The beginning of any year is a natural time to take stock of your processes, resources, and systems while looking for opportunities to improve efficiency. There’s just something natural about the flipping of a calendar that makes us want to look around and say “is there something I could be doing better? Is there an easier way to do this?”

In the rapidly shifting intelligence and security industry, investigating these questions can lead to important conversations about your organization’s security posture. “Security” is a broad term and can mean a million different things; and a SOC can be configured a thousand different ways with any number of different platforms, systems, and analysts working to keep you safe. Taking the time to assess your current SOC setup and make the right decisions can save countless hours, allow you to reallocate scarce resources, and most importantly, prevent serious risks. 

All of these points mean that 2022 is the year for you to begin integrating intelligence into your current SOC and harness the power that comes when you combine intelligence with automation. 

Why Does Your SOC Need Intelligence?

Maybe you’re reading this and thinking, “my organization’s SOC has a ton of different tools for collecting data. Why would I need anything else when we’ve already got more data than we can handle at any given time?” Or maybe you’re not thinking that and I’ve just created a hypothetical that allows me to drive at my point, who knows!

The key difference is that data isn’t intelligence. Data is raw information that requires massaging and critical thinking to parse its meaning. You can have all the data in the world but you still need to understand what’s important and what you don’t need to focus on. In many SOCs it can be difficult to bring in data from different sources and have it correlated, meaning more work for analysts, and valuable time wasted. 

That’s where intelligence comes in. Intelligence is what sorts data into clear information, allowing you to take quick and decisive action. Intelligence is the difference between knowing about a threat when there’s still time to act, and being too late. Taking it one step further, what you really want to unlock is trusted intelligence—intelligence you trust to help you make decisions within seconds and feel confident with your actions.

As you can see, intelligence should be a crucial part of your SOC, but of course the remaining question is: how do you inject intelligence into your SOC?

Integrating Intelligence into Your SOC—and the Possible Benefits

The easiest way to bring intelligence into your SOC is by integrating it into your existing systems and platforms. There’s no need to overhaul the entire security team you worked hard to organize; intelligence is about refinement, taking raw data and turning it into actionable insights. 

For instance, Recorded Future seamlessly integrates into your SIEM environment, enriching the alerts you see and giving you greater context. When you layer intelligence into your existing environment you no longer have to waste time searching on the web to comb through research and figure out if you’re facing a real threat. Recorded Future provides real-time context based on machine learning, natural language processing, and human analysis. 

The relationship between an intelligence platform like Recorded Future and a SIEM is a two-way street, too. The data flows both ways, meaning the intelligence within Recorded Future becomes instantly actionable because it is configured specifically for your organization’s environment.

What does the real-life benefit of no more harried Googling, and true intelligence, look like? A Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study found that the Recorded Future platform can reduce investigation time by 40%, help your organization identify 20% more threats, and reallocate on average at least two threat analysts. 

“By integrating intelligence into our existing IBM Security QRadar [SIEM] system and workflows, and automating analysis, we believe we have improved the accuracy and operational efficiency of security monitoring by a factor of three to four” - Keita Nagase, Chief Information Security Officer, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.

Integrating intelligence into your SOC—specifically your existing tools and processes—is the easiest and most effective enhancement you can make in 2022. Threat actors are only getting smarter and more brazen, and having raw data alone won’t help anymore. You need actionable intelligence that enables you to make the correct decisions and act at the speed of the adversary.

To learn more about the power of Recorded Future’s intelligence, and how simple it is to integrate into your existing systems, click here.