This article was published in the IBM Resilient Knowledge Center on April 16, 2018. You can read the original post here.

Today, we are proud to announce the launch of Intelligent Orchestration with the next-generation of the IBM Resilient Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Platform. This new platform resets the standard for incident response (IR) by dramatically accelerating and sharpening the entire response process. By blending human and machine-based intelligence with orchestration, automation, and IR case management, Intelligent Orchestration empowers organizations to outsmart, outpace, and outmaneuver complex cyber security threats. This is an exciting leap into the future of incident response – a market that we pioneered and continue to innovate.

Intelligent Orchestration is needed today because of the security challenges organizations face: complex security environments, a skills shortage, and the increasing volume and severity of attacks. Because of these challenges, security teams often struggle to respond to and mitigate cyberattacks quickly and efficiently. With the average cost of a data breach reaching $3.62 million and new regulations with tougher penalties on the horizon, organizations need to maximize the speed, efficiency, and intelligence of their existing tools and people.

To address this, organizations are investing in IR orchestration and automation. Recent research from Gartner reveals their Security Operations and Response (SOAR) model as having three essential components: Security Orchestration and Automation, Security Incident Response Platforms, and Threat Intelligence Platforms. Particularly with this new release, Resilient stands alone as the only platform that can thoroughly deliver all three in a single integrated platform.

Moreover, our IRP with Intelligent Orchestration is the first to deliver real-time visibility across Security Operation Center (SOC) tools, offer quick time to value, and enable a guided response capability. As a result, security teams can now more fully harness the power and agility of their people, process, and technology to better battle cyber threats.

How Intelligent Orchestration Works

With the new Resilient IRP, security analysts can orchestrate and automate time-consuming, repetitive, and complicated actions that previously required significant human intervention. Enterprise-grade, bi-directional integrations available via a drag-and-drop business process management notation (BPMN) workflow engine enable security teams to build Dynamic Playbooks that enable a “guided response.” As analysts work through an incident, Resilient guides them step-by-step through the process, ensuring the right person, gets the right information, at the right time.

Not only are integrations available to the workflow editor, they are now componentized and reusable. As a result, once an integration is added to Resilient, its capabilities can easily be added to multiple workflows, combined together in whatever fashion is required. This abstraction layer between the workflow and the underlying integration components frees the security analyst building a new process from having to re-develop an integration to support a new use case.

All of this would be interesting, but not nearly as exciting, if we didn’t have a bunch of new integrations. Fortunately, we are also excited to deliver a robust ecosystem of partner integrations that are now available via the IBM Security App Exchange. The IBM Resilient Orchestration Ecosystem, featuring key partners such as Cisco, McAfee, Splunk, Carbon Black, Symantec, and others, gives customers an open and easy way to share data and actions between multiple technology solutions and security tools. The Resilient IRP automatically initiates activities across these partner technologies spanning monitoring and escalation, identification and enrichment, communication and coordination, and containment, response, and recovery.

Two years ago at the RSA Conference, IBM Security announced that they had acquired our company. Since then, we’ve been fortunate to partner with lots of organizations and witness the transformative power of a vibrant incident response program. We’ve invested heavily and worked hard to make Resilient even better. With this release and its Intelligent Orchestration components, we’re excited to take these capabilities to a new level, make them easier to adopt, and bring them to a broader array of organizations.

For more on Intelligent Orchestration, download our latest white paper today.