Many organizations are seeking to lessen the impact of the cybersecurity skills gap by increasing the productivity of their existing staff — and incident response (IR) orchestration can help.

IR orchestration provides a guided response, which ensures analysts know what they need to do and when they need to do it. It arms analysts with the intelligence and tools to get the job done. As a result, analysts react and resolve incidents faster, and junior analysts respond like more senior analysts.

How to Beat the Cybersecurity Skills Gap

In our on-demand webinar, “How to Alleviate the Security Skills Gap through IR Orchestration,” which features Joseph Blankenship, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, we outlined real-world examples of how organizations use IR orchestration to improve their teams across all levels — from analysts to the C-suite.

Blankenship highlighted three ways your organization can start to orchestrate its response processes to help beat the skills gap.

1. Streamline Repetitive Triage Tasks

Analysts are bogged down (and, often, burnt out) by having to manually investigate the thousands of security events that organizations face daily. In the triage phase of response, analysts spend hours querying and pulling reports from disparate systems. This limits productivity and increases staff fatigue and turnover.

Security managers can combat this by automating many of the basic and time-consuming investigative tasks repeated daily. This not only improves staff efficiency and effectiveness but also enables analysts to focus on more strategic (and meaningful) tasks.

Watch the on-demand webinar: How to Alleviate the Security Skills Gaps through IR Orchestration

2. Develop a Structure for Reporting, Assessment and Improvement

With an IR platform, IR managers can structure response phases and associated reporting. This enables them to measure their team’s performance and identify bottlenecks — and uncover opportunities for professional development. For example, if certain teams or team members consistently take longer in the detect and analyze phase, they might need training on how to use threat intelligence feeds or other enrichment controls more effectively.

With this data easily accessible, IR managers can modify processes and develop workshops to foster the professional development of their existing staff.

3. Educate the C-Suite

In addition to reporting on team performance, orchestrating response with an IR platform can also help security managers give insight to the C-level about the state of their organization’s global security function. It can do so by centralizing security and incident response activity from around the world into a single view.

By creating globally focused key performance indicators (KPIs) and reports for the C-suite, security leaders can unlock new conversations about bigger change within the security function. This creates awareness about specific skills gap needs and helps justify budget and staffing allocations. For example, if phishing incidents spike out of India, this provides a great opportunity to justify anti-phishing training and education in the region.

To learn more about how IR orchestration can help organizations beat the skills gap, watch our complete on-demand webinar today.