The ServiceNow Security Operations module offers significant benefits to those in the company dealing with security by offering greater integration and less time to respond to incidents, thanks, in particular, to the automation of the sending of alerts and their classification.
Pervasive advantages also concern the impact on the response time to incidents and on how analysts can have access to all the data necessary to better address the situation. Many businesses have to contend with unnecessarily complex spreadsheets that slow down incident response as well as being prone to transcription errors or oversights. The spreadsheets, e-mails and phone calls resulting from a security incident blind the company management, who struggles to understand the impact on the business and to have the useful data to improve the decision-making phase. ServiceNow's answers are the Security Operations module, together with automation and integration with IT services.
Better incident response in less time
A company may have to deal with 400 alerts every day and most of them are made up of false positives. Automation therefore becomes mandatory to prevent significant security problems from being ditched by less important alerts. If the latter are submerged in manually transcribed spreadsheets, company security can be in serious danger. The damage deriving from cybersecurity, in fact, develops exponentially: the more hours pass without solving a problem, the greater the damage, since the companies that follow in the supply chain will also be damaged. Responding to incidents quickly is key. ServiceNow's Security Operations module provides analysts with the priority alerts they actually need to deal with, while the management of minor ones is automated. A common example is failed authentications. In this case, the automated system will ask the user for confirmation and if the latter responds positively, the alert is archived without having involved any employee.
The Security Operations orchestrator
ServiceNow unites in chorus all the services related to cybersecurity already present in the company making sure that they are able to communicate. This is possible because the Security Operations module brings together the information coming from IT and the security area by collecting the data in a single stream. This way, alerts are not dispersed nor do they have to be entered by hand in complicated spreadsheets. What happens essentially? When a monitoring system sends an alert, ServiceNow automatically assigns it a priority level based on the type. Similarly, the platform automates the collection of all contextual information necessary to analyze the alert, for example from public security tools or threat feeds. In short, it is not the analysts who has to go hunting for the data they need; these are provided directly and the analyst can deal directly with the evaluation of the problem and how to solve it.
Automation has saved ServiceNow itself time and money
ServiceNow itself is the first customer of its Security Operations module. We needed a system that would speed up the work of analysts and allow them to work better so that each person could deal with more accidents. The results have been incredibly positive. The adoption of the Security Operations module guaranteed ServiceNow an estimated savings of $400,000 per year, a 50% increase in the number of security-related incidents that each analyst was able to handle, and a six-fold improvement in speed of response to an alert thanks to automation and integration with third-party products. In addition, the digitalization of cybersecurity has made it possible to save 8,700 hours every year in the centers that deal with Security Operations. Talents are likely to stay because they have found an environment in which to express their skills, which they have worked on for a long time, to effectively analyze cybersecurity incidents without wasting time on tedious manual operations. For its Integrated Risk Management services, ServiceNow was named a Leader for the second consecutive year in Gartner's "2019 Magic Quadrant for Integrated Risk Management".