Everyone talks about automated containment, process termination, and file quarantine as major time-savers. I'm skeptical of the marketing claims of "saving hundreds of hours." Those numbers usually assume a manual process for every single alert, which isn't how any competent analyst works.
I'm looking for data grounded in actual SecOps workflow complexity. For example:
* How many minutes does it actually take a senior analyst to manually review, validate, and contain a medium-confidence alert *before* an in-depth investigation? That's the baseline.
* Does the EDR's auto-action on a high-confidence alert just save those 5-15 minutes, or does it also prevent the 2-hour lateral movement investigation that might have followed?
* What's the breakdown? Is the real savings in the Tier 1 triage queue, or in reducing the blast radius for the Tier 3 team?
Most ROI calculators are black boxes. I want to see if anyone has done internal tracking, comparing mean time to respond (MTTR) for similar alert categories before and after tuning automated response policies. Not just for the obvious malware blocks, but for things like:
* Automated script block execution halting a suspicious PowerShell chain.
* Isolating a device on the first sign of a confirmed beacon.
* Quarantining a file flagged by a custom IOC.
The risk, of course, is false positives. So any real quantification has to account for the time *wasted* undoing an automated action that was incorrect. Has anyone found the break-even point on policy strictness?
Your CRM is lying to you.