How Cloud SOAR helps higher education institutions prevent cyber attacks

In today’s digitized world, it is essential that universities and colleges create a safe learning environment for their students. This includes both physical and digital safety. But cyber attacks in higher education institutions are becoming a more common occurrence.

In recent years, more and more institutions of higher education have been targeted by cyber attacks, underlining the necessity of creating a better-guarded cybersecurity landscape. If universities and colleges don’t take the matter of securing the digital premises seriously, they risk putting confidential information of their students and employees on the line, which will hurt their reputation, as well as their financial situation.

This is why it’s essential for universities and colleges to explore their options and increase the efficiency of their SOC team by incorporating state-of-the-art technology solutions, such as Cloud SOAR.

How Cloud SOAR can help higher education institutions combat cyber attacks

To be able to combat the most sophisticated threats, universities and colleges must acquire the most sophisticated technologies. This means setting up firewalls and VPNs will no longer cut it.

Cyber attacks are evolving at a rapid pace, leaving many organizations vulnerable if they don’t keep up with the level of sophistication modern cyber attacks acquire.

What universities and colleges need to do to enhance their cybersecurity posture is to first:

• Create a high-functioning SOC (Security Operations Center) team

• Incorporate contemporary technologies

It makes no sense to purchase the most cutting-edge technology if your team does not have the skill set to operate it. What you want is a highly professional SOC team of security professionals that understand their roles in SecOps perfectly. Only after you’ve put together a great team, you should consider upgrading their resources by adding top-quality technologies to the mix.

In this regard, Cloud SOAR can be a valuable asset to every cybersecurity team. Cloud SOAR is designed to increase the functionality of every SOC by incorporating unique features that almost instantly boost the productivity of the SOC team by up to ten times:

• Automation: Receiving high volumes of cyber alerts means that security analysts are obliged to assess every single threat in order to find out if they pose an actual danger or not. And due to the enormous amount of alerts, this often means that security analysts suffer from alert fatigue. In this scenario, Cloud SOAR alleviates the burden by automating a wide range of tasks, thus helping analysts save time and focus on more relevant tasks.

• Orchestration: By creating a centralized dashboard, Cloud SOAR allows every tool within the SOC to connect on an optimal level, thus allowing the productivity of the SOC to achieve its maximum potential. By applying orchestration, Cloud SOAR brings together people, processes, and technologies, increasing the overall efficacy of SecOps. With Cloud SOAR, you can coordinate tasks from different tools in a seamless manner and establish desirable workflows that align with your cybersecurity goals.

• Response: By offering SOC teams a guideline approach to incident response, Cloud SOAR allows security professionals to quickly respond to cyber attacks and improve the response time by up to 80%. Also, by automating a wide range of menial and repetitive tasks, Cloud SOAR allows analysts to have more time to sharpen their threat-detection skills and respond to the threats that matter in a timely and efficient manner.

Higher education institutions must respond to cyber attacks as quickly as possible, especially when it comes to institutions that manage sensitive information, such as universities and colleges.

Every additional second of breach time means you’re allowing hackers to have more time to cause even greater damage. Today it is not a matter of IF, but WHEN a cyber attack is going to occur. This is why it is crucial that your SOC team works like a well-oiled machine, responding to threats in an optimal, preventative manner.

Why Cloud SOAR is the best solution for higher education institutions

When considering implementing a SOAR solution, institutions of higher education need to understand that not all SOAR technologies are the same. Just as all cars are vehicles, but not all of them offer the same quality, the same goes for SOAR.

What makes Cloud SOAR different is that we at Sumo Logic have crafted our SOAR solution with our customer’s needs in mind. We try to take into consideration the needs of every potential type of customer so that Cloud SOAR is as customizable as possible, and we pride ourselves on achieving that:

• Cloud SOAR doesn’t affect or alter your conventional way of carrying out security operations. It only improves your visibility and adds more layers of control over how your security operations are being handled.

• Cloud SOAR offers integrations with some of the most popular tools in the industry, allowing you to build a cybersecurity landscape according to your wishes.

• Follow relevant KPIs by setting over 140 relevant performance indicators via a customizable dashboard.

• Assess threats in real-time with the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

• Detect false positives with incredible accuracy with the help of progressive automation.

Cloud SOAR is created with the goal of improving your cybersecurity posture. With the help of automation and orchestration, your university will be able to ward off even the most sophisticated cyber attacks.

How to make the most out of Cloud SOAR

The important thing to remember is the sole action of incorporating Cloud SOAR doesn’t replace the essential components of a well-oiled SOC. What this means is that Cloud SOAR acts as a force multiplier, rather than a force enabler.

Cloud SOAR improves the functionality of every other solution it interacts with. Let’s take SIEM, for example. SIEM offers other functionalities, like thorough alert detection, that SOAR just doesn’t match. But, on the other hand, SOAR is far more autonomous than SIEM, as it operates on the premise of automation and machine learning.

So, the best thing to do is combining your SOAR solution with the rest of the cybersecurity tools. That would allow universities and colleges to exploit the benefits of a SOAR solution at an optimal level and also improve the efficiency of their other resources.

Learn more about how to reap the benefits of our Cloud SOAR by checking out our expansive collection of blog posts.