You may have noticed a strong theme recently on our website, social media, and content: noise. No more noise; noise down, security up; Noise-Down Automation—we’ve been talking about it a lot. So, what does it mean? What is Noise-Down Automation and how does it benefit security teams?

First, we need to define what we mean by noise. Noise is everything that distracts security teams from their mission of keeping their organizations secure. Noise wears security pros down, leading to burnout, high turnover, and wasted resources. The best example of noise is false positive alerts. According to a study by Enterprise Strategy Group, 75% of companies spend as much time on false positives as they do on real incidents. That one statistic shows the impact of noise. It suggests that if those companies could get rid of noise, they would double the capacity of their security teams!

Automation that gets rid of false positives at scale—that’s Noise-Down Automation.

What a SOC with Noise-Down Automation Looks Like

Picture a security operations center (SOC) that is calm, efficient, proactive, and almost entirely free from noise. Noise-Down Automation has transformed their SOC. They can now use automation to turn an endless torrent of low-fidelity alerts into a small number of high-fidelity incidents that they can investigate thoroughly.

Their automation tool’s integrations, utility commands, and playbooks are expertly designed and maintained, so they can rely on their workflows to do exactly what they are supposed to do, instead of tying up resources with troubleshooting, maintenance, and writing scripts.

They can easily perform cross-dimension correlation, which gives them visibility across IOCs, TTPs, tools, timeframes, and artifact risk levels—all without screen-switching, manually chasing down data, or letting important connections slip by unnoticed.

Critically, their automation solution is scalable, so they can put every alert from their environment in a single automated queue for triage and investigation.

How Smart SOAR Turns Down the Noise

If Noise-Down Automation is so transformative, why isn’t every vendor offering it? Because it’s really hard. If users can’t trust that their system is dismissing the right alerts, then it’s impossible to turn down the noise. Building that trust requires a strong foundation of technology. Legacy SOAR vendors have, for the most part, not been interested in taking on this challenge. Newer workflow products are just surface-level solutions, without either the power under the hood or the security expertise needed to solve complex problems like noise.

Because of our singular focus on security automation, D3 has made the investment necessary to endow Smart SOAR with the capabilities of Noise-Down Automation. There are several important pillars supporting those capabilities:

1. The Event Pipeline. To eliminate false positives, duplicates, and other noise, you need to automate normalization and triage at the alert level. Smart SOAR’s Event Pipeline does this, only escalating confirmed threats to the incident level.
2. Scalability. The playbooks required for confident auto-dismissal can involve hundreds of actions, so to automate the handling of every alert requires massive scalability. Smart SOAR is built to handle the needs of the world’s largest companies and managed service providers, with cloud-based dynamic allocation of resources.
3. Expert-built and maintained integrations. Smart SOAR is completely vendor-agnostic, with every integration based on research by our team. No community-built integrations or Python scripts needed.
4. Utility commands. These hundreds of commands simplify playbooks by combining many actions into single, reusable blocks that can be dropped into playbooks. Instead of treating each API call to an integrated tool as its own action, Smart SOAR executes all of them as a single command. This makes playbooks faster, easier to manage, and less likely to fail.

Get Started Turning Down the Noise

Now that you understand the basics of Noise-Down Automation, you are probably picturing the benefits it could have for your security team. Fewer alerts going by uninvestigated. Analysts that have the time to perform deep investigations on real threats. Better morale resulting in less turnover. These are all outcomes that we see our customers experiencing.

On top of all that, Noise-Down Automation brings down your overall costs. It’s expensive to spend half of your time on false positives. It’s also expensive to replace burnt out analysts. That’s to say nothing of the biggest cost of all: recovering from a major incident after it slips by ineffective defenses. IBM’s 2024 report puts the average cost of a data breach at $4.88 million—a number that should incentivize every organization to spend less time distracted by noise.

We are so confident in Smart SOAR’s ability to turn down the noise that we guarantee our customers at least a 91% reduction in incident volume. Visit our ROI Center to calculate how much business value you can create with Smart SOAR.

Want to learn more about Noise-Down Automation? Read our easily digestible eBook, No More Noise! Make Your SOC Your Sanctum.

The post What Is Noise-Down Automation? appeared first on D3 Security.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from D3 Security authored by Walker Banerd. Read the original post at: https://d3security.com/blog/what-is-noise-down-automation/