From Chaos to Control: Harnessing the Power of Asset Tagging in Splunk SOAR
By David Burns, Senior Soar Engineer
In the realm of cybersecurity, effective asset management is paramount. Splunk SOAR offers robust features for asset management via tagging. Let’s explore the transformative power of asset tagging within Splunk SOAR, focusing on its ability to enhance visibility, streamline workflows, and bolster security operations.
Enhancing Visibility with Customizable Tags
Splunk SOAR empowers organizations to create custom tags to annotate assets with additional metadata or attributes. These tags provide contextual information about assets, allowing security teams to categorize and prioritize assets based on their unique characteristics. For example, tags can denote asset type, ownership, criticality, compliance status, or any other relevant information. By leveraging customizable tags, organizations gain unparalleled visibility into their IT infrastructure, enabling more informed decision-making and proactive risk management.
Streamlining Workflows with Tagging
Whether tags have been assigned automatically to assets, or manually, it allows for actions to be executed in bulk. This automation ensures consistency and accuracy across asset management workflows. By automating actions with tags, security teams can focus their efforts on strategic initiatives rather than manual administrative chores, thereby increasing operational efficiency and agility. For instance, let’s have a playbook that stores backups of a server configuration in git. Instead of having each server have its own playbook, you run the action on a tag. Then adding a new server to the workflow becomes a matter of creating the new asset with appropriate tag. No duplicating or updating of playbooks.
Driving Insights with Tag-Based Searching and Reporting
Tags play a pivotal role in enabling advanced searching and reporting within Splunk SOAR. Security analysts can leverage tags to perform targeted searches and generate custom reports tailored to their specific requirements. For instance, security analysts could use tags to filter assets based on their compliance status, allowing them to generate reports specifically focused on non-compliant assets. This provides valuable insights into areas that require immediate attention and helps organizations maintain regulatory compliance more effectively. By harnessing tag-based searching and reporting capabilities, organizations can uncover hidden patterns, mitigate emerging risks, and optimize their security posture effectively.
Asset tagging within Splunk SOAR offers a transformative solution for cybersecurity and IT asset management. By leveraging customizable tags, automated tagging, and tag-based searching and reporting, organizations can shift from disorder to mastery in their security operations. Embrace asset tagging in Splunk SOAR to safeguard digital assets and defend against emerging threats effectively.
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About the Author
David Burns is a security engineer with experience working with Splunk Enterprise Security and Splunk SOAR (formerly Phantom) for a large fortune 200 bank. Before that he was a System Security Engineer working on the automation of security testing of OT systems. He brings his 20+ years programming background to use SDLC in rapid development of playbooks, custom functions, and more leading to modularity, re-use in design, and better long-term maintenance. For example, creating deeper integration for escalation through Slack and creating EDL management for multiple clients. At TekStream, he developed the slack escalation methodology that notifies customers of events that need their attention as well as a way of process for generating and updating EDLs within Splunk.