Companies are increasingly looking to replace their old manual ticketing system with a ticketing automation system. 

Indeed, Ticket management is central to IT and cybersecurity. Ticketing is the process of tracking, managing, and resolving requests and incidents. Focusing on cybersecurity, we're talking about tickets registering alerts generated by your security tool stack. It's usually carried out thanks to a help desk software solution. 

The market for these help desk software solutions is growing fast, and ticket rates are piling up on the analyst front desk. As the number of alerts increases, the number of tickets multiply. The same goes for their complexity, often requiring further investigation and other manual tasks to be thoroughly handled. A top-of-the-notch held desk solution can only do so much to streamline the different sources needed to manage tickets.

This is where the need for an efficient ticket management system finds answers within the SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response). SOAR's unique Automation and Integration capabilities as a Service are crucial for streamlining, organizing, and prioritizing your help desk request tickets. 

Below, we'll look at the following points: 

• Ticketing management often falls into a tedious job

• Harness the SOAR to build a Ticketing Automation System

Current Ticketing Management systems are tedious

They also lead to many repetitive tasks for teams.

Multiple factors make a properly functioning ticket management system challenging in cybersecurity and IT. 

Take ticket routing (or assignment), for instance. Sometimes, companies have no rules determining how incident tickets are assigned to agents or teams. Agents take the tickets as they appear, with no regard for their knowledge and skills. This system can also make agents avoid tickets deemed too challenging or requiring a more significant amount of work at first glance. 

Manual ticket routing is also time-consuming and inefficient. Time lost could be spent elsewhere, particularly when the flow of tickets is growing. 

Once the ticket has been created, there's the enrichment issue. Most of the time, the original alerts need further investigation to qualify as true positives or false positives or even to see if they're duplicates. Such a ticketing system would mean that the analyst in charge of the ticket would have to undertake the enrichment process manually. With varied sources of intelligence and information, the analyst quickly multiplies the tabs even if they want to check the litigious URL in a database like VirusTotal. 

Ultimately, although the tasks involved in determining the nature of the alert aren't complex per se, the time and effort needed to complete them are too great. 

If incidents were sparse, this manual system would hold. But as incidents have multiplied exponentially in recent years, most ticketing systems are drowned in incident tickets. This creates a dangerous state where analysts cannot ingest the flow of tickets and even determine their criticality, leaving potential loopholes undetected and unprocessed for days. 

Long story short, risk, risk, and risk.

On top of that, the elasticity of the cyber professionals' workforce is a known issue. In 2021, there's a gap of 3.1 million workers. One could argue that companies need to hire more analysts. The truth is that there are first not enough talents to recruit. Second, these jobs aren't attractive and prone to high turnovers, besides generating stress. Third, it's just not the way to go! You're not resolving the core issues by recruiting more and more people. It's the processes that are the issue. They're the ones that need to change. 

The answer to these challenges is ticketing automation via a no-code SOAR. 

Benefits of Ticketing Automation with a SOAR

Using a tool like Mindflow, creating a ticketing automation system isn't a complex task, thanks to its no-code approach to cybersecurity. With the right tool, this can be implemented shortly in your company for immediate benefits. Take ticket creation/deletion or their enrichment through each use case; there are multiple benefits you can expect from automation. 

Below, we'll look at some of them. 

Automatically assign tickets: When creating playbooks, you can define which agents will be given this use case. With ticketing automation, tickets are created and assigned directly to an agent or the employee concerned and notified via an internal messaging platform. As such, the assignment is automatic; there's no gatekeeper directing tickets to other agents in the team. 

For example, a playbook for malicious login attempts can automatically create an incident ticket and escalate it to a determined agent.

Create and close tickets automatically: Sometimes, the employee concerned by the incident doesn't answer the agent's request for details for various reasons. Leaving these tickets open forever can lead to an accumulation and disturb the system's proper functioning. Ticketing automation through playbooks enables agents in charge of ticketing management to predetermine callbacks and incident closing cases of tickets after the investigation is handled if the alert is deemed false positive. 

As such, the number of tickets, which is more than often artificially magnified by the sheer number of false positives and duplicates, is reduced, which helps to keep the incident ticket queues low and clean.

Enrichment: Most of the time, the incident reported by the ticket needs further investigation to be correctly assessed by the agents in charge. As we said above, it often leads to the multiplication of the panes of glass and ends up being a time-consuming task. Before being escalated to the agent assigned, the ticket can be enriched in various ways. The playbook can provide steps to cross-check the artifacts collected with other sources listing known Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and gathering additional information, such as threat reports. 

This way, agents in charge take over an already investigated ticket and decide to proceed with the workflow further.  

Triage and prioritization of most urgent tickets: Some incident tickets don't require an immediate response. Some are, on the contrary, urgent matters. Detecting which tickets report a critical incident requiring prompt investigation and remediation is essential for any cybersecurity team. Thanks to the SOAR capabilities, the designated playbook can automatically enrich artifacts first collected in the initial ticket. An incident criticality scale can be issued by interrogating Threat Intelligence feeds or private databases to push forward the most critical and urgent tickets to handle first.  

Weekends and holidays: Often, one agent in the security team has the knowledge and skills to handle the ticketing system. Simply put, the system runs on the shoulders of one agent who cannot support it 24/7. Should this agent leave or take holidays, the system's functioning would be impacted, and risks arise. Ticketing automation is a way to extend the ability to handle the processes to other agents. A SOAR like Mindflow eases the creation, investigation, and handling of reported incidents. Moreover, by combining all of the benefits above, less urgent matters can be put on hold to allow the most urgent ones to be processed quickly.

Reduce ticket response and resolution time: We've seen that ticketing automation provides a wide array of benefits, including triage and hierarchization, automatic enrichment, assignment, and creation/deletion.

Combining these factors ultimately speeds up the time required to process each ticket while reducing the likelihood of human error. Thanks to improved information and consistent handling of repetitive tasks through automated processes, incident tickets, once triaged and prioritized, receive better-informed responses more quickly. The backlog of unresolved incidents decreases, as do the associated risks.

Conclusion

In a dynamic threat landscape where incidents multiply quickly, ticket management systems often fall short as they still heavily rely on manual tasks executed by understaffed teams. Agents must undergo tedious and time-consuming tasks on increasingly diverse tools, sometimes lacking semantic awareness regarding other tools in their security stack. The inadequacy of these ticketing systems with the threat landscape threatens your agents' productivity and increases the risks that breaches go unnoticed for an extended period. 

Use Mindflow's unique integration capabilities and pre-built actions to infuse automation in your ticket processes in cybersecurity incident response, IT workflows, and more. Create an incident ticket by simply invoking your helpdesk in a playbook and enriching it by adding multiple sources of information, without any line of code typed, from a single platform.

Effective ticketing automation improves the speed, quality, and throughput of incident and change management processes.