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Axitea revolutionises the Italian SOC market with Cortex XSOAR

13 September 2023

 

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Redazione Axitea

When Axitea informs its customers that its Security Operations Centre (SOC) uses the Palo Alto Networks’ XSOAR, the interest this generates goes through the roof. This modern orchestration, automation and security response platform is helping the Italian provider of physical and logical security solutions to win new market spaces, scale SOC activities and ensure a smooth and consistent analyst experience.

Keeping up with the growing demand for SOC services

The increased demand for SOC services has led Axitea to choose more scalable processes and a more efficient system to cope with the growing volume of alerts and activities. Fragmented monitoring processes made it difficult to scale the SOC’s operations and ultimately limited business growth as analysts took too long to switch between consoles.

Protecting Italy’s future

Since 1914, Axitea has been dedicated to the research and development of new security technologies and services to respond to changes in the sector, while retaining the pioneering spirit that has always characterised its approach. In fact, in order to meet a rapidly evolving market, Axitea today complements its surveillance services with innovative technologies and advanced physical and IT protection systems.

The move to cybersecurity was one of the most forward-looking moves in Axitea’s history. According to the European Investment Bank, there are approximately 4.3 million small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Italy, which generate 67% of the country’s GDP: one of the highest percentages of SMEs in Europe. The vast majority of these are looking for agile and efficient cybersecurity services, and Axitea is becoming the provider of choice for many of them.

In this context, Axitea’s SOC was designed to unify and coordinate the threat detection and response capabilities of its customers. However, previously installed traditional monitoring systems required six analysts for incident management alone.

The first challenge for Axitea, therefore, was scalability. Axitea’s second challenge was to find an orchestration, automation and security event response platform that would integrate with various customer data sources, including web gateways, EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response), firewalls and data loss prevention, as well as with various security technology providers.
The third challenge concerned the end-user experience.

Automation, scalability and visibility

The requirements for the next generation SOAR platform include:

  • Ensuring agile and resilient monitoring and responses to customers.
  • Automating SOC processes, eliminating manual intervention as much as possible.
  • Scaling up monitoring to support Axitea’s business growth ambitions.
  • Implementing agnostic systems for universal integration with various third-party security solutions.

The definitive answer to almost every cybersecurity question

Axitea chose to transform its SOC incident response process with Cortex XSOAR from Palo Alto Networks.

Cortex XSOAR aggregates alerts from different detection sources (cloud and SaaS security, firewalls, EDR, virtual private networks (VPNs), email security and more) before running automated playbooks for enrichment and response to these incidents. Playbooks coordinate between technologies, security teams and external users, offering centralised visibility and intervention on data.

The SOC-as-a-service model takes this solution to the next level. Previously, Axitea only managed the EDR solutions it had installed. Today, however, it handles any EDR solution. The SLAs contracted with customers define precise response times, e.g. 30 minutes for critical incidents and one hour for high-level incidents.

Moreover, the Cortex XSOAR community is one of the most extensive in the SOAR world, with over 900 integrations in the Cortex Marketplace and predefined playbooks for the most common use cases.

XSOAR is a true differentiator

With Cortex XSOAR, Axitea is redefining security orchestration, automation and response for over 500 customers. The benefits include:

  • Supporting business growth: the use of Cortex XSOAR is contributing significantly to Axitea’s revenue growth.
  • Built-in scalability: the platform is scalable and standardises incident response processes.
  • Increased productivity: before implementing XSOAR, the SOC had six dedicated analysts, whereas it now employs only two, despite a marked increase in the number of customers.
  • Less need for additional analysts: despite a 50% increase in SOC activities over the last 12 months, the number of analysts required by Axitea’s SOC did not increase.
  • Faster incident response: analysts use instant searches, queries and investigations to speed up complex real-time investigations and incident response.

The contribution of Palo Alto Networks Professional Services was essential for this success.

Download the full Case Study document.

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