Why Email Security Orchestration Is Critical for SecOps Teams

How we do business has changed dramatically in the past 20 years, but one technology remains an invaluable piece of the puzzle—email. You and your employees likely send and receive hundreds of emails per day. And while most of those emails are legitimate, many are Business Email Compromise scams or phishing attempts that put your business at risk.

That’s where email SOAR comes in.

Email SOAR (or M-SOAR) is a sophisticated protection solution that keeps you safe from increasingly common attacks. In 2015, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) registered 19,465 phishing complaints, and in 2020, that number rose to more than 240,000. Personal data breaches and identity theft complaints follow a similar pattern.

As various malicious attempts continue to rise, M-SOAR can be a lifesaver for frequently overworked security operations (SecOps) teams. With that in mind, we’ll look at the importance of integrating email SOAR into your cybersecurity strategy today.

What is Email SOAR (M-SOAR)?

M-SOAR stands for email security orchestration, automation, and response. As a version of SOAR dedicated to incoming and outgoing email content, M-SOAR technology relies on automation and centralization to improve overall email security.

Through machine learning (ML), AI, and natural language understanding (NLU), M-SOAR can handle most—if not all—of your SecOps team’s tedious tasks. M-SOAR can:

• Manage email-based threats and vulnerabilities with minimal input
• Flag suspicious emails and alert users about potential scams automatically
• Recognize socially engineered threats and employee impersonation attempts
• Respond to phishing attempts and scams based on parameters you set

In short, M-SOAR is a top-to-bottom, all-in-one email threat management solution that can improve the quality of life for CISOs, SecOps analysts, and employees.

6 Reasons Email SOAR Benefits Security Operations

Email SOAR solutions come with a range of benefits. Here are six reasons why M-SOAR can help streamline your security operations.

1. Handle Repetitive Manual Tasks

One of email SOAR’s key features is automation. M-SOAR can remediate most manual tasks through ML and NLU analysis; eliminating repetitive manual tasks that are a time suck for security teams.

Email SOAR can automatically:

• Identify and catalog vendors
• Delete, quarantine, and label emails
• Send alerts about possible impersonation attacks
• Detect the loss of sensitive information
• Create a threat investigation timeline
• Triage and remediate user-reported threats

M-SOAR can orchestrate and automate 75–97% of all manual work associated with users reporting phishing emails.

2. Improve Security Posture

M-SOAR also helps improve your overall security posture. Any advanced email security solution gives you a leg up on competitors and protects you from common scams and data loss. But with M-SOAR, you have a future-proof setup that continues to learn from each employee and organization it touches.

3. Recognize and Respond to Email Threats in Record Time

One of the biggest problems with run-of-the-mill email security solutions is a slow response time. Whether due to limited resources, unmanageable number of alerts and signals, or an influx of attacks, threats can go unnoticed for extended periods of time. The longer it takes to detect and handle a cyberattack, the more it can damage your entire organization.

M-SOAR helps reduce your mean time to detect (MTTD) by thoroughly analyzing all incoming and outgoing mail. Using AI technology, email SOAR can recognize potential threats in moments—whether they’re user-reported or not—and alert your SecOps team.

And once you’re aware of a threat, you can act accordingly. M-SOAR also improves your mean time to respond (MTTR) by automatically handling certain incidents and generating threat reports at your chosen cadence. Between these insightful analytics and the ability to search and sort emails, your team can quickly respond to threats without manually monitoring the mailbox 24/7.

M-SOAR solutions can find attacks that security teams might otherwise miss and avoid mistakes due to the overwhelming number of potential threat alerts and signals that all require human review. The result? A noticeable reduction in MTTD and MTTR, and time savings for your security teams.

4. Reduce Alert Fatigue

M-SOAR reduces false positives that plague security teams and waste precious hours.

Email SOAR filters out the noise of false positives, bringing the attacks that need human review front and center.  User-reported threats can flood your abuse mailbox, and the more alerts you have, the harder it is to catch genuine threats––where time is of the essence. Through providing context-rich detail, security teams spend less time filtering through alerts and more time dedicated to remediating threats and incidents in real time.

5. Enjoy Fast and Easy Integration with SIEM and SOAR

M-SOAR doesn’t need to replace your team’s SOAR or SIEM (security information and event management) solutions. Instead, it can complement these existing strategies to automate the remediation of targeted threats. Email security solution providers should integrate with the top SIEM and SOAR solutions to save security teams time through reducing the need for manual threat response.

Armorblox M-SOAR integrates into the top SIEM and SOAR solutions:

• Cortex XSOAR
• Microsoft Sentinel
• SentinelOne
• Splunk

As SOAR becomes the industry standard in intelligent dynamic security, M-SOAR will be a critical component. By coordinating email alert and response workflows with your other security protocols, you can create a robust ecosystem that protects user, employee, and company data.

6. Free Up Valuable Time for Your SecOps Teams

Automating tedious, time-consuming tasks with M-SOAR enables your SecOps team to be more proactive. Instead of wading through thousands of alerts, your analysts can take an offensive approach to cybersecurity. SecOps analysts with more time on their hands can:

• Develop threat response plans
• Research new issues and security solutions
• Evaluate high-level threats and events
• Train other users on best practices

Additionally, when your teams have the opportunity to take on meaningful work and put their skills to the test, they’ll experience increased job satisfaction.

With all this in mind, email SOAR provides a two-pronged approach to improving your security. First, the technology creates a safer environment out of the box. Second, the automation features give your team more opportunities to improve further.

Remediate and Reduce Manual Email Threat Remediation With Armorblox

With email-based attacks continuing to rise, M-SOAR represents the future of comprehensive, convenient, enterprise-wide cybersecurity. But choosing the right M-SOAR solution is as vital as implementing email SOAR in the first place.

At Armorblox, we’ve combined the knowledge of industry veterans with deep learning and NLU to develop a future-proof M-SOAR platform. By analyzing language and behavior at the employee, enterprise, and global levels, we help you stay safe, secure, and compliant.

To discover firsthand how Armorblox protects your business from ever-changing threats, click the link below and take a 5-minute product tour.