More businesses are turning to digital solutions to facilitate day-to-day operations, and as a result, we have seen major growth in the market for security service providers. This growth, however, has brought with it increased competition between MSSPs and third-party service providers, as they are both targeting the same market and using similar services. For managed security service providers to stay competitive, they must offer distinguished service portfolios that meet the individual needs of each organization in their customer base. Enter: Fortinet’s FortiSOAR platform.
FortiSOAR is a comprehensive and vendor agnostic security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform designed to help security operations center (SOC) teams simplify threat identification and response tasks. MSSPs can unify customers’ operations by offering a customized security framework that integrates FortiSOAR into the customer’s existing infrastructure. With an individually-tailored SOAR solution, customer SOC teams can more easily manage the developing threat landscape and take a more proactive approach to overall security.
The FortiSOAR Platform: Key Features
Organizations are continuing to implement point solutions across their networks to keep pace with threat actors. Though these solutions can help from a security standpoint, they also limit the SOC team’s ability to accurately identify threats due to the fact that they fragment security infrastructures. This presents numerous challenges for security teams to conquer, including alert fatigue, slowed response times, and issues maintaining regulatory compliance. FortiSOAR addresses these challenges and eliminates the need for point solutions by centralizing key security features in a single platform. Below, we outline the key features of FortiSOAR:
Role-Based Incident Management
FortiSOAR features an Enterprise Role-Based Incident Management solution that provides security teams with access control capabilities based on team member roles. This makes it easier for SOC teams to manage critical data while adhering to administrative policies and guidelines. SOC analysts are able to prioritize threats in real-time by leveraging a customized view of network assets, which improves incident response times and accuracy. Further, FortiSOAR’s Recommendations Engine helps predict the severity of incidents based on historical reports, aiding in the identification of duplicates or false positives.
Role-Based Reporting Dashboards
With role-based dashboards and reporting, customers can better measure, track, and analyze both threat investigations and overall SOC performance. FortiSOAR offers users a library of industry-standard dashboard templates to ensure that SOC teams have access to the tools they need to optimize their day-to-day activities.
FortiSOAR also provides teams with comprehensive reports that can be customized. Detailing Incident Closure, Incident Summary, and Incident Progress. SOC teams can leverage insights from these reports to easily track KPIs and identify areas where improvements can be made.
Multi-Tenancy
By providing distributed multi-tenant product offerings with scalable, secure, and distributed architectures, MSSPs are able to offer MDR-like services. With FortiSOAR, organizations gain the ability to automate tenant workflows remotely, enabling streamlined management of individual customer ecosystems and security efficacy. FortiSOAR also provides customers with personalized alerts, incident views, and dashboards so that they are involved in approval requirements.
Visual Playbook Builder
FortiSOAR features a Visual Playbook Designer, coming with 150+ OOB playbooks. That allows SOC personnel to design, develop, and leverage playbooks in a way that maximizes efficiency, without requiring advanced programing skills. The designer simplifies playbook creation using a smart drag and drop interface that incorporates playbook simulation, workflow code execution, looping, and error handling in one easy process. The platform enhances vulnerability management and compliance capabilities by allowing customer SOC teams to automate workflows through its playbook builder.
Case Management Capabilities
FortiSOAR aids in holistic case management by offering OOB modules that support incident response, vulnerability management, and fraud mitigation. MSSPs can develop custom modules to meet individualized security requirements and support customer business objectives as they grow in size and complexity.
FortiSOAR Use Cases
FortiSOAR functions as part of Fortinet’s integrated Security Fabric architecture and a number of unified security tools under one single, centralized platform. This frees up time for SOC teams to focus on more business-critical tasks. Let’s explore four strategic use cases for SOC teams offered by FortiSOAR:
Unified SOC Operations
FortiSOAR streamlines SOC operations by integrating point security solutions into a centralized system that can be deployed across network environments. SOC teams can operate FortiSOAR alongside existing security solutions while also gaining a unified point of visibility and control. This reduces the chance of ecosystem fragmentation and extends the life of existing tools, helping to maximize the ROI of past purchases.
Automated Alert Triage
FortiSOAR aggregates security alerts and provides threat context, accelerating time to resolution. This aggregation lessens the volume of “false-positive” alerts and helps SOC teams prioritize threats based on the level of severity, assigned tasks, and subroutines. FortiSOAR simplifies complicated tasks such as triage, enrichment, investigation, and remediation by leveraging automation capabilities and correlating alerts from across the network. These capabilities help eliminate issues associated with alert fatigue, context switching and reduce SOC team workloads.
Accelerated Incident Response via SOC Augmentation
A high number of manual workflows can hinder threat investigations by increasing the risk of human error or oversight. FortiSOAR alleviates this risk by augmenting the security operations center using automation features from FortiAnalyzer and FortiSIEM, enabling robust orchestration and automation of all SOC processes and improving overall security.
SOC automation allows security teams to increase operational efficiency by setting threshold conditions at which FortiSOAR will leverage different controls to complete the optimal threat response in real-time. In fact, SOC teams can reduce incident response times by up to 98% with FortiSOAR.
Freeing Up SOC Team Resources
FortiSOAR leverages case management and automation capabilities to reduce the waste associated with disjointed security incident response. As threats grow in sophistication, increased SOC efficiency will assist in reducing the TCO for network security solutions. Further, FortiSOAR can help minimize employee burden by limiting the need for manual input during threat responses, thus, reducing the overall workload for SOC teams.
Final Thoughts
With FortiSOAR, MSSPs are able to offer customers offer hyper responsive, customized services with optimum security efficacy that actively address the challenges SOC teams face as the network attack surface continues to expand. As the market for security orchestration, automation, and response grows, the FortiSOAR platform ensures that MSSPs are equipped to offer differentiated services and take advantage of new business opportunities.
Guest blog courtesy of Fortinet. Read more Fortinet blogs here.
