Incident response teams face myriad uphill battles, such as the cybersecurity skills shortage, floods of security alerts and increasing IT complexity, to name just a few. These challenges often overwhelm security teams and leave security operations center (SOC) directors searching for strategies to maximize the productivity of their current team and technologies to build a capable incident response plan.

One emerging solution is a familiar one: an ecosystem of developer and expert communities. Collaborative online forums have always been a critical part of the cybersecurity industry, and communities dedicated to incident response are growing more robust than ever.

How to Get Involved in a Developer Community

Incident response communities can be a crucial resource to give security analysts access to hands-on, battle-tested experience. They can deliver highly valuable, lightweight, easy-to-use integrations that can be deployed quickly. Community-driven security can also provide playbooks, standard operating procedures (SOPs), best practices and troubleshooting tips. Most importantly, they can help foster innovation by serving as a sounding board for your team’s ideas and introduce you to new strategies and techniques.

That all sounds great, but how do you know what community can best address your incident response needs? Where do you begin? Below are a few steps to help you get started.

1. Find the Communities That Are Most Relevant to You

To combat new threats that are being coordinated in real time, more and more vendors and services are fostering their own communities. Identify which ones are most relevant to your industry and business goals.

To start, narrow down your search based on the security products you use every day. In all likelihood, you’ll find users in these product-based communities who have faced similar challenges or have run into the same issues as your team.

Once you’ve selected the most relevant communities, make sure you sign up for constant updates. Join discussion forums, opt in to regular updates, and check back frequently for new blogs and other content. By keeping close tabs on these conversations, you can continuously review whether the communities you’ve joined are still relevant and valuable to your business.

2. Identify Existing Gaps in Your Security Processes

Communities are disparate and wide-ranging. Establishing your needs first will save you time and make communities more valuable to you. By identifying what type of intelligence you need to enhance your security strategy and incident response plan ahead of time, you can be confident that you’re joining the right channels and interacting with like-minded users.

Discussion forums are full of valuable information from other users who have probably had to patch up many of the same security gaps that affect your business. These forums also provide a window into the wider purpose of the community; aligning your identified gaps with this mission will help you maximize the value of your interactions.

3. Contribute to the Conversation

By taking part in these conversations, you can uncover unexpected benefits and give your team a sounding board among other users. As a security practitioner, it should be a priority to contribute direct and honest information to the community and perpetuate an industrywide culture of information sharing. Real-time, responsive feedback is a great tool to help you build a better security strategy and align a response plan to the current threat landscape.

Contributing to a community can take various forms. Community-based forums and Slack channels give developers a voice across the organization. By leveraging this mode of communication, you can bring important intelligence to the surface that might otherwise go under the radar. Forum discussions can also expose you to new perspectives from a diverse range of sources.

A Successful Incident Response Plan Starts With Collaboration

For its part, IBM Security gathers insights from experienced users across all its products in the IBM Security Community portal. Through this initiative, IBM has expanded its global network to connect like-minded people in cybersecurity. This collaborative network allows us to adapt to new developments as rapidly as threats evolve.

Collaboration has always been cybercriminals’ greatest weapon. It creates massive challenges for the cybersecurity industry and requires us to fight back with a united front of our own. With the support of an entire security community behind you, incident response tasks won’t seem so overwhelming and your resource-strapped SOC will have all the threat data it needs to protect your business.

Discover Community Day at Think 2019