Cortex XSIAM: Manual SOC to Automated SOC with
Revolutionary. A Paradigm Shift. The Future of SecOps. These are the words being used to describe Cortex XSIAM, Palo Alto’s newest SecOps platform solution. Does this SIEM replacement solution live up to the hype? And what, exactly, is so great about it? XSIAM is essentially a complete rethink—from the ground up—of the Security Operations Center (SOC), built to address the most pressing pain points of manual SOCs: analyst overload and burnout, slow investigation and dwell time, ineffective threat analysis, and siloed, decentralized data.
This solution was long overdue. The traditional SOC and SIEM model is a 20-year-old design (unlike the Cortex XSIAM) that is simply outmatched by today’s data growth and sophisticated attacks. According to a Forrester study conducted in 2020, the average SOC deals with over 11,000 security alerts per day and 28% of those alerts are never investigated. Traditional SIEM platforms can’t keep up. They’re too hard to use, too expensive, and ineffective at their key function: keeping an organization’s data safe by stopping serious threats.
One of the key root causes is the patchworked combination of security tools that have been layered in over time. Many organizations are balancing multiple solutions to handle each sector of IT architecture: one tool for endpoint detection and response (EDR), another for cloud security, another for network traffic analysis (NTA). Since none of the solutions can cross-reference and correlate the flagged activity they’re seeing, a torrent of alerts floods into the SIEM, with a poor analyst trying to make sense of it all. It makes your brain hurt just thinking about it. It’s a triage system centered on the human analyst and it worked…20 years ago. But the needs of the SOC have changed and traditional SIEM platforms cannot handle the scale and complexity of modern IT environments. SOC teams need a better, more effective tool.
Cortex XSIAM is proving to be a transformative, proactive tool for SOC teams looking for more efficient ways to identify and investigate serious threats and to sync up disparate data sets. Automation and centralization are two of the foundational concepts. XSIAM is a new architecture created for a modern SOC that can handle and address the thousands of alerts faced by SOC teams today. Let’s take a closer look at how it is modernizing the SOC.
HOW EMBEDDED AUTOMATION WORKS WITH CORTEX XSIAM
Bringing in AI to automate low-level, routine assessment tasks is the first step. XSIAM’s automation-led SOC model handles low-risk, repeated alerts, blocking attacks with minimal assistance from human analysts. It is still a triage-based system, only now, automated responses siphon out and handle any low-risk alerts. The idea is to free up analysts so they can do what only humans can do: investigate the high-risk, serious incidents that require human intervention. This allows more accuracy, with less time wasted on false positives or wild goose chases. It also brings the analyst’s workload down to a human-scale, manageable amount.
What does this look like in practice? Palo Alto Networks uses Cortex XSIAM in their own SOC, processing nearly 40 billion alerts per day, with an average of only eight per day requiring human investigation. In another example, a company using XSIAM cut its mean time to resolution (MTTR) from 3 days to 16 minutes. Not only are you eliminating the backlog, you are ensuring that your analysts are focusing their time and energy on legitimate threats.
SOC CENTRALIZATION
Cortex XSIAM gathers network, endpoint, identity, and cloud security data under one roof and presents it all in a centralized dashboard. It is a cloud-delivered, integrated SOC platform unifying all your key security functions including EDR, XDR, SOAR, ASM, UEBA, TIP, and SIEM. XSIAM eliminates the need for different solutions of XDR, automation, logs, etc. and puts everything in one place. With XSIAM, you’re not losing any of the capabilities of these tools. In essence, you’ve now got an All-star MVP team, with each of these tools playing nicely and communicating with the others. XSIAM can incorporate telemetry from any source, offering flexibility and hybrid options to suit your current IT architecture.
What all this means in practice is that an SOC team gets a complete picture of every attack. Events can be analyzed from any perspective (endpoint, network, identity systems, and cloud) simultaneously. This expanded contextual picture amps up an SOC team’s ability to detect, investigate and respond appropriately all while still delivering all of the common SIEM functions such as log management, correlation and alerting, reporting, and long-term data retention.
This whole centralized system allows SOC teams to focus on operations instead of switching between tools or sorting out how disparate components work together. An added perk of XSIAM is the Command Center. Its user-friendly UI is streamlined and simplified, with elegant visuals that show the entire SOC workflow.
BE PROACTIVE WITH THREAT HUNTING
An additional conceptual leap that Cortex XSIAM offers is proactivity. Traditionally, SOC teams work reactively, with analysts playing the role of detective, retracing and trying to minimize damage that has already been done. But everyone knows the best offense is a great defense. With XSIAM’s Attack Surface Management (ASM) capability, SOC teams get an attacker’s view of their IT architecture. They can search their own attack surface to identify which systems are vulnerable and preemptively fortify or repair them.
Streamlined. Simplified. User-friendly. Human-centered. Cortex XSIAM has an answer for each of the struggles facing traditional SIEM platforms: overloaded manual processes, fragmented tools, and slow response times. XSIAM addresses these issues with a centralized, automation-first approach, offering quicker threat detection, real-time incident response, and lower operational costs. Through an AI-powered partnership, you can refocus your SOC team’s priorities—allowing analysts to concentrate on the work that they do best: high-level complex problems that match their expertise and experience.
Implementing Cortex XSIAM requires the right cybersecurity expertise. Comport has years of experience in deploying these solutions, helping enterprises enhance security operations, automate SOCs, and improve threat response. Our experts understand modern IT complexities and work closely with you for a smooth transition to Cortex XSIAM.
Contact us for more information on how Cortex XSIAM can be customized to address your specific security requirements, ensuring optimal utilization of your investment.
