As organisations continue to accelerate their dependency on technology to achieve their desired outcomes, the number of attack vectors for cyber attacks also increases at an alarming rate! Even companies that invest in a gamut of tools, people and other resources to improve cyber security still face a plethora of threats. Let’s explore how ServiceNow Security Operations can help.
Cybersecurity is no longer just an IT issue. It has become a business issue that requires attention from all departments, all employees and all suppliers.
Organisations across the globe share the view that identifying and containing security threats and breaches takes too long. These delays result in substantial financial losses and reputational damage. In some cases, threats to national security. Additionally, the industry has identified several related issues that must be addressed in line with improving cyber security posture:
- Manual processes and unstructured data – About 60% of organisations say that things slip through the cracks due to processes being executed with abundant use of emails, spreadsheets and phone calls – for IT processes and Security Operations!
- Sluggish responses to known threats and vulnerabilities – Over 87% of organisations have fallen victim to a known vulnerability that should have been addressed.
- Lack of Orchestration – Analysts and IT Security staff spend a significant amount of time working through various unmanageable workloads, therefore, reducing efficiency.
What is ServiceNow’s role in improving security?
ServiceNow can complement the existing security tools implemented, contextualising multiple data points with service information and providing a system of action to enable you to efficiently and confidently act upon the information available. It works through integration with the tools you have and leveraging your CMDB. Security Operations teams can address security incidents and vulnerabilities proactively, and help organisations to mitigate them faster.
The security analysts will be able to:
- Identify Threats up to 10x faster
- Improve incident response time by 70% and drastically reduce security incident MTTR
- Reduce unplanned Downtime
- Boost overall IT Security analyst efficiency by 40%
- Reduce overall cost of security operations
What is ServiceNow Security Operations?
ServiceNow Security Operations provides organisations with an automated and centralised security operations centre (SOC) solution. It collects security data from various tools and sources that are already in the organisations, such as network device scanners, endpoint protection tools, vulnerability scanners, firewalls and threat intelligence feeds. This information is then analysed and correlated to identify potential threats, and security teams can take appropriate actions to remediate them.
ServiceNow Security Operations provides security teams with an incident response framework to help them respond quickly and efficiently to security incidents. The module can prioritise incidents based on their severity, impact, and other criteria to ensure that teams are working on the most critical issues first. ServiceNow Security Operations also provides automated workflows SOAR (Security Operations Automated Remediation) to help teams collaborate and coordinate their efforts.
The Playbooks within Security Incident response help Security Analysts assess the information from various sources in real-time, take necessary action using automation and contain security breach faster than before. ServiceNow integrates SOAR with MITRE ATT&CK to help prioritise resolution with business contexts and automate actions and remediations.
How does ServiceNow Security Operations help identify hacks?
ServiceNow Security Operations can help identify hacks by collecting and analysing security data from various detection sources. It can detect anomalies in the network traffic, endpoint behaviour and logs that may indicate a breach. It can also analyse logs with Artificial Intelligence from applications, databases, and servers to identify any suspicious activity. Approximately 60% of organisations believe that they would not be able to identify threats in time if AI was not there to support them.
ServiceNow Security Operations can integrate with a plethora of threat intelligence tool feeds to provide teams with real-time information about the latest threats. Using STIX data and TAXII profiles These threat intelligence can also be shared with other reliable sources.
The Security Operations utilise CMDB exhaustively to take into account all the Configuration items and Business applications present in the organisations. Bringing in business context it helps the Security Analyst prioritise and remediate actions faster. A comprehensive information set in CMDB, enriched with business context and a map of application services together become a powerful combination set of information for a Security Analyst when such a potential threat is identified in the organisation.
Once a potential threat is identified, ServiceNow Security Operations can initiate an automated incident response process. It can create an incident record, notify the relevant teams, and provide them with detailed information about the threat. The analysts work with playbooks to help support the resolution steps and automation that can enable them to contain the incident faster.
The incident record also contains information about the affected assets, the potential impact, and the recommended remediation steps. With Orchestration, actions can be performed automatically faster.
How does ServiceNow Vulnerability & Configuration Compliance help mitigate hacks?
ServiceNow Vulnerability provides organisations with a centralised vulnerability management solution. It integrates with organisations existing network scanning tools to the network, servers, and endpoints to identify vulnerabilities and prioritise them based on their severity and impact. ServiceNow Vulnerability integrates with the NVD database to import the current vulnerability and relevant information to prioritise actions and patches.
It works with Security Operations and CMDB, to provide a complete vulnerability management solution. The Vulnerability Management assesses all the configuration items in your organisation’s CMDB for recent vulnerabilities against NVD (National Vulnerability Database).
Once vulnerabilities are identified, ServiceNow Vulnerability Response can get in action with a playbook. This playbook has an automated workflow to help analysts remediate and patch it. ServiceNow Vulnerability can also integrate with other security tools. For example patch management and configuration management, to ensure that the remediation process is comprehensive.
In addition to vulnerabilities, ServiceNow configuration compliance enables IT security analysts and administrators to keep the endpoints compliant. How? By identifying, prioritising and remediating misconfigurations in the endpoints and software. Security Operations Performance Analytics in ServiceNow can help businesses assess data with real-time dashboards. These help monitor security-specific KPIs with trend charts and time graphs.
How can Devoteam help you?
Devoteam has significant experience providing advisory, consulting and implementation services in ServiceNow Security Operations. We’ve worked with over 50 EMEA clients in multiple industries, including Financial Services, Manufacturing, Oil and Gas. We specialise in Security Advisory services, Security Automation and Managed Security Services. We have a dedicated team of Consultants who have both experience and certification in ServiceNow Security Operations, Vulnerability Response, Governance Risk and Compliance. Get in touch for more info!