Get the Full Picture with Intelligent Alert Management

Here’s a fact. A sensitive cybersecurity alert management system is useful, but sometimes alerts can get annoying. Repetitive and less important alerts create a lot of noise that can block out meaningful information and critical alerts. With planned and unplanned attacks rising exponentially, cybersecurity practitioners must keep on their toes continuously and be prepared to respond immediately while controlling the impact of an attack. That’s where Intelligent Alert Management comes in.

There is massive pressure to handle alerts while sifting through threat data to get meaningful information. Intelligent Alert Management helps prioritize alerts and provides actionable information, making it easier to answer questions like:

• How do we optimize the overwhelming amount of data on security threats and vulnerabilities?
• How do we handle future attacks more proactively?
• How do we update business teams about the dangers and repercussions of specific security threats?

And this is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Intelligent Alert Management can deliver so many more benefits and make it easier for IT teams to optimize their processes and protect the enterprise.

Avoid Financial Loss

With prior information extracted from threat analysis, informed decisions are made in time thus enabling prevention of system downtime. Cybersecurity professionals can better protect confidential data and intellectual property, and consequently saving the organization’s reputation and post-incident remediation and restoration costs.

Utilize IT Resources Efficiently

Collecting and analyzing threat intelligence is a time- and resource-intensive process, especially as organizations usually lack the required specialized tools and skillsets. Leveraging platforms that can automatically generate and collate this intelligence will speed up the process and will ease the burden off internal resources.

Eliminate alert noise

Redundant alerts or the same information being shared repetitively by a monitoring tool distracts IT security teams and delays faster response to security alerts. Intelligent Alert Management allows cybersecurity professionals to categorize alerts according to multiple parameters, sort out actionable alerts, and prioritize or suppress alerts as required. By conducting the first level analysis and providing security analytics with alerts that mean something, Intelligent Alert Management helps reduce alert fatigue.

Leverage context-driven automation

To be able to quickly grasp an incident in its entirety, IT security teams need the complete context that includes data other than just the basic details. It should include details such as node, message, description, tags, event time, etc. Combined with contextual information, cybersecurity professionals find it easier to avoid unnecessary and time-consuming triage and get the alert to the right person faster. They can also create efficient workflows that can support dynamic escalations and assign them on the basis of several parameters. This actionable data helps in prioritization of vulnerability patch management as well.

Ensure More Effective Protection

Intelligent Alert Management helps enhance the efficacy of security tools, equipping them with data about the type of threats, repeated attacks from the same source, alert attribution, alert trail, systems impacted, and so on. This focused intelligence ensures easy alert detection and timely fixing. All notifications from multiple sources and monitoring tools can be piped in together, making this intelligence available on single pane of glass eliminating the need for screen hopping and bridging the gap between insight and action. Moreover, all the insights that security analysts collect will also relate the overall health of the organization’s infrastructure and network, thus enable optimization and cost efficiencies.

Summary

Organizations with immature defenses against cyber-attacks tend to rely heavily on raw threat data collected from multiple tools. Internal teams can feel overwhelmed with all this data as they struggle to process these feeds for insights. And focusing on the less critical aspects in the initial few hours of a cyber-attack can result in the team missing the window of opportunity to negate or minimize the impact of the attack.

Without Intelligent Alert Management for analysis, it is difficult to put this data to use and make a real impact. A smart alert management platform will automate intelligence consolidation from diverse sources to support decision making. Faster detection of threats leads to faster escalation, and hence timely response and remediation.

If you’re considering adding threat intelligence to your alert management system, begin with defining the scope of alert intelligence requirements. The next step is for security analysts to get relevant intelligence data; followed by making that intelligence actionable during an attack by normalizing and analyzing this data using a powerful alert intelligence platform. This will allow them to respond to incidents faster, reducing the financial and reputational damage caused by internal and external attacks. Intelligence Alert Management thus helps enterprises achieve significant cost savings and efficiency gains relative to unstructured, manual approaches to managing the complexities of threat intelligence.