Laying the Foundation for a Resilient Modern SOC

SecOps teams face more challenges than ever, including an expanded attack surface, an increased number of vulnerabilities, and a non-stop barrage of cyberattacks – all of which have materially increased organizational risk. According to Splunk’s State of Security Report 2023, security operations centers (SOCs) have become so overwhelmed that 23% of SOC analysts say they struggle with a high volume of security alerts. There are so many to process that 41% of those alerts are being ignored. With threats slipping through the cracks, this translates into slow mean time to detect (MTTD), dwell times of about 2.24 months, and 52% of organizations reporting recent breaches.

These existing challenges are being met with future headwinds and potential opportunities. According to the recently released Splunk Security Predictions 2024 report, generative AI will emerge as both a tool and a threat. Security analysts will use it to automate security tasks to address talent shortfalls, while attackers will create AI-designed evasive malware, deep fakes, and more authentic social engineering tactics. New types of assaults will emerge in 2024, including commercial and economic disinformation campaigns, with more targeted attacks against companies’ brands and reputations. Ransomware authors will increasingly rely on zero-day threats to infiltrate networks. 

Security teams must develop resilience to mitigate the risk caused by these challenges. Splunk research shows that digitally resilient organizations win in the face of disruption, with those farthest along the digital resilience journey saving an average of $48 million annually in downtime costs. In fact, it’s reported that improving digital resilience is a catalyst for security operations changes, with 9 out of 10 respondents saying it factors into their organization’s SecOps strategies more than it did 12 months ago.1 CISOs know they must improve the efficacy and efficiency of their security operations. Indeed, 84% of organizations claim it is among their organizations’ top 5 technology priorities.¹  

Enter Splunk. Splunk Security supports your journey to digital resilience by providing comprehensive security visibility to reduce business risk; equipping your team with risk-based threat detection, investigation, and response technologies to help you build a modern SOC; and fueling security innovation through Splunk’s vibrant community.  

So, how do we do it? 

Reduce Business Risk with Comprehensive Visibility

Reducing risk for the business starts with establishing visibility into your data. Splunk Security’s AI-powered platform provides the foundational capabilities for unified visibility and context by ingesting, normalizing and analyzing data from all enterprise sources. This results in three critical outcomes for the SOC: 

Detect threats faster: No critical signals are overlooked by analyzing data from all sources. Using Splunk Enterprise Security, our industry-defining SIEM, you can locate any event using our federated search feature, regardless of where the data is stored. Additionally, the platform utilizes data models and architectures like the Common Information Model (CIM) and Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) to align disparate data sources and increase the efficiency of data analysis.

Gain contextual understanding of incidents: At the beginning of 2023, Splunk Enterprise Security released two new visualizations – threat topology and MITRE ATT&CK Framework visualization – to help analysts achieve rapid situational awareness of an incident and close cases faster. Threat topology allows you to understand the full scope of an incident by mapping the relationship between users, machines, and threats, giving you improved situational awareness and an expanded viewpoint. Moreover, MITRE ATT&CK Framework visualization comprehensively shows how various tactics and techniques have impacted security assets or identities. From there, analysts can quickly drill down into MITRE ATT&CK reference material to gather additional context and plan a response.

Proactively address risk: Splunk's risk-based alerting (RBA) capability enhances threat prioritization by attributing risk to users and systems, mapping alerts to cybersecurity frameworks, and triggering alerts when risks exceed set thresholds. This increases alert fidelity, focuses analysts on the threats that matter most, and has been shown to reduce false positives. Additionally, Splunk offers over 1,450 ready-to-use detections aligned with industry frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, NIST CSF 2.0, and Cyber Kill Chain to ensure protection against the latest advanced threats and proactively mitigate risk. And we can’t forget that Splunk also released Splunk AI Assistant in 2023 to simplify and accelerate workflows by making SPL more accessible. 

Build a Modern SOC with Unified Threat Detection, Investigation and Response (TDIR)

Splunk provides a unified threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR) solution that is powered by industry-defining SIEM, orchestration and automation (SOAR), integrated threat intelligence, and user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) technologies – complemented by a unified modern work surface and automated attack analysis. These technologies lay the foundation for a modern SOC and long-lasting security resilience. 

Detect, analyze, and investigate with an industry-defining SIEM: A modern TDIR solution must be built on the foundation of an industry-defining SIEM. Splunk Enterprise Security has been named a SIEM leader by Gartner 9 times in a row. Analysts use it to achieve comprehensive visibility into their data, and transform that data into actionable insights. Splunk Enterprise Security empowers analysts with accurate and contextual threat detections, fueled by its risk-based alerting capability that prioritizes and isolates high-fidelity alerts and decreases alert volumes to boost analyst productivity. Built-in incident visualizations, such as “threat topology” and “MITRE ATT&CK Framework” released in 2023, further aid analysts with a contextual understanding of security events. Threat intelligence is also built into Splunk Enterprise Security for automatic pre-enrichment so analysts can move faster and make informed decisions. Meanwhile, Splunk User Behavior Analytics (UBA) offers an extra layer of anomalous behavior analysis (powered by machine learning) that is especially well-suited for insider threat detection and uncovering unknown threats, with behavioral analytics capabilities accessible within Splunk Enterprise Security or as a separate standalone offering.

Automate SOC processes and respond rapidly: A modern TDIR solution must also offer security orchestration and automation to increase analyst efficiency and speed up investigations and response actions. Splunk SOAR (Security Orchestration Automation and Response) is offered as a standalone technology, or bundled and integrated with Splunk Enterprise Security. Splunk SOAR helps analysts work smarter and increase efficiency and productivity by automating otherwise manual tasks. Using “playbooks” that automate security tasks across many tools at machine speed, analysts can investigate and respond to threats in seconds, not minutes or hours. This eliminates analyst grunt work, saves time, and lowers mean time to respond (MTTR) to threats. With the implementation of Splunk SOAR, customers experience significant time savings, reducing the time spent on routine tasks by 90%. In 2023, we also introduced Splunk Attack Analyzer, which automates threat analysis and provides associated digital forensics. Splunk Attack Analyzer automatically follows and analyzes complex attack chains to help analysts understand active threats, enhance detections and accelerate investigations. Splunk Attack Analyzer integrates with our automation engine, Splunk SOAR, to provide fully automated, end-to-end threat analysis and response. 

Unify it all: In early 2023, Splunk Mission Control was added as an integral capability within our industry-defining SIEM, Splunk Enterprise Security (ES). Mission Control provides a common worksurface that unifies SecOps workflows across detection, investigation and response using pre-built templates aligned to industry frameworks. Now, analysts don’t have to pivot between security tools as they work through detection, investigation, and response actions. Analysts can see and understand security incidents across the entire lifecycle, and work through those incidents using SIEM, threat intelligence, and SOAR all from one interface. This allows your team to determine risk faster, streamline workflows, build repeatable processes to better protect against threats, and investigate and respond more quickly. This unification also helps the SOC reduce regulatory risks and meet compliance requirements around log management, long-term log storage, and incident management. With a centralized solution, you can collect, search, monitor and analyze data to meet compliance requirements more efficiently.

Empower Security Innovation by Leveraging the Vibrant Splunk Community

Splunk's vibrant user community is a dynamic and resourceful hub for addressing security challenges. Across users, partners, apps, and threat research, there’s something for every security use case to help your SOC move faster and make better decisions. 

Find answers to your questions: Over 250,000 Answers Community users address more than 57,000 questions monthly across over 150 global user group chapters, providing a rich resource for resolving any security challenge. The Splunk community empowers members to contribute to the platform's innovation by suggesting or voting on product enhancements, thereby directly shaping the future of Splunk's offerings and capabilities. 

Build what you need: Splunk’s openness allows users to create custom apps and playbooks, seamlessly integrate existing tools, and tailor solutions to meet their organization's unique security needs without restrictions. Users can participate in challenges like Boss of the SOC (BOTS) or showcase their skills in playbook creation through the Splunk Automation Games, fostering a dynamic and collaborative community among Splunk users.

Access partners, apps and threat research: Splunk's extensive community, comprising over 2,200 partners and more than 2,800 partner and community-built apps on Splunkbase, offers a wealth of resources to address custom use cases tailored to your specific technology stack. The platform provides essential tools for integrating various systems, including SAP, AWS, and Salesforce, with Splunk, ensuring seamless connectivity and data flow. Additionally, Splunk users benefit from the expertise of the SURGe and Splunk Threat Research teams, gaining access to the latest threat research and updates. Splunk Enterprise Security is supplemented by 1450+ (and counting) out-of-the-box detections provided by Splunk’s Threat Research Team which is tasked with uncovering unknown threats in the wild and diving deep into detection engineering. This support enables users to effectively respond to threat-specific technical challenges, guided by recent research and expert recommendations.

Start Your Resilience Journey Now

Splunk is ready to support your resilience journey and help you lay the foundation for a resilient modern SOC. With Splunk, you can regain control and confidence and transform your SOC from reactive chaos to proactive resilience. Click here to learn more about what you can achieve with Splunk Security. Dive deeper into our technologies, leverage security expertise and research, and embark on your resilience journey.

^{[1] Source: Splunk’s State of Security Report 2023
[2] Source: Splunk’s State of Security Report 2023
[3] Source: Splunk’s State of Security Report 2023
[4] Source: Splunk Digital Resilience Pays Off Report 2023}