Everyone here at Sumo Logic is thrilled to announce our inclusion as a Leader and Outperformer in the 2021 GigaOm Radar Report for Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR). We’re excited that our Cloud SOAR solution is getting this recognition and we’re confident that this is just the beginning. We are even more motivated to keep on innovating and molding Cloud SOAR into a solution that will pave the way for the future of the modern SOC.

Even though the cybersecurity skill gap dropped for the first time in recorded history in 2020, it is still one of the most pressing problems in the industry. Demand continues to eclipse the supply of skilled cybersecurity professionals. The scarcity of qualified security workers with the right skill set, experience, and talent means that critical vulnerabilities turn many organizations into sitting ducks in the eyes of hackers.

Most organizations understand the critical role that cybersecurity solutions play in protecting their environment. However, the abundance of available tools that claim to serve that need are leaving them unsure they're actually protected against today's sophisticated threats.

The cybersecurity landscape is constantly evolving, even more so in the past decade, with technological revolutions changing the core of the cybersecurity industry. With new emerging technologies, machine learning, security automation, and AI are slowly but surely becoming a reality in the cybersecurity world. But as the cybersecurity landscape continues and redefines the roles of security workers, which logically begs the question - what does this mean for security professionals?

The speed at which security operations are processed and data is consumed is moving at a dazzling pace. This is why flexibility, customizability, and user-friendliness are deemed as core pillars of next-gen security solutions. And it is exactly what Cloud SOAR’s Open Integration Framework is all about.

Today’s complex cyber threats leave no room for mediocrity. Security analysts must know who is attacking them, how the attacker gained access, what methods they used to infiltrate your systems, and what their next move might be. However, modern cyber threats leave no recognizable patterns in their behavior, making threat anticipation harder than ever. To boost their threat hunting capabilities, SOC teams must implement advanced technologies and strategic techniques.

In today’s fast-paced cyber threat landscape, it is not a question of IF but WHEN an organization is going to get breached. And in order to prepare in a preemptive manner, organizations should strive to minimize their attackers’ dwell time as much as possible. This is why metrics such as MTTR (Mean time to respond) and MTTD (Mean time to detect) have grown to be highly relevant in the cybersecurity industry.

Scalable, cloud-native solutions like Azure Sentinel help security teams streamline security operations in cloud environments. In this first of a two-part blog series, we explore the challenges businesses face when detecting and responding to cyber threats and attacks, and how these challenges can be addressed by leveraging Microsoft Azure Sentinel.

Whether it’s because we’ve watched one too many sci-fi movies, or we’re just plain scared of the potential of AI, automation, and machine learning, many suggest that the dawn of automation is going to make humans obsolete in security operations.

When it comes to cybersecurity automation, there is the persistent fear that security automation is here to replace humans. And while those fears are somewhat justified, the reality is that automation in security operations is meant to aid, not hinder security professionals. And with cyber threats evolving at a dazzling rate, cybersecurity automation is slowly becoming a necessity, rather than a luxury.