Incident Response Close to Home: Atlanta Executive Dinner

With 17 of Fortune 500’s headquarters in Georgia, many of Atlanta’s elite were in attendance at Resolve Systems’ Executive Dinner hosted at Kevin Rathbun Steak on February 28. Discussing trends and best practices of network, IT, and security incident response and resolution, the wine cellar was at capacity.

Amuse-bouche: Information Security at the Forefront of Georgia

Paul Scully, VP of Resolve Systems, kicked off the night with a cheers on how to solve problems of IT operations, Network operations, and security operations.

With Georgia ranking third in the nation for information security, and home to 10,000 computer system engineers, Resolve Systems knew some of the nation’s top innovators were there to network and discuss how automation and orchestration can help with incident response and resolution.

The Meat of it All: Incident Response and Resolution in Bite-sized Chunks

Larry Lien, CPO of Resolve Systems, chatted with the diners about the team sport of incident response and how automation can be deployed as needed.

“Many organizations are going through a digital transformation; from a NOC to a dark NOC, from a legacy SOC to a modern day SOC. It’s all about incident response and resolution. This is achievable with automation and orchestration, but automation alone isn’t enough. You need to understand processes and capture critical knowledge. It comes down to automation, process, and knowledge.”

Resolve advocate and customer, Mark Henninger, was also in attendance and reaffirmed this point by presenting on how his company, Windstream, is optimizing and expanding their use of Resolve.

To Larry’s point, and in Mark’s actual experience, the conversation led to one conclusion: automating in bite-sized chunks not only knocks out simpler tasks, but enables teams to do more with less. As dinner was served, Mark continued talking about how he put together a Network Surveillance Team tasked to do the work of a larger team. They are first responders and do initial triage of an alarm and troubleshooting. This team verifies the alarm is an actual event, confirms there are no duplicate tickets, and creates a ticket for a technician.

“I led the Resolve initiative and focused on Powered Environmental alarming. The biggest need – and the biggest success – was automating for remote high temperature alarms,” said Henninger.

Taking care of where they need results first, the Network Surveillance Team could then expand with other use cases.

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The Sweet Conclusion: How long does it take to put Resolve automation into production?

Mark fielded many questions about the challenges of building automation. What was his concluding advice?

“I came up with a circuit automation and it was in production 2 days later,” said Henninger to the Atlanta audience.

Aghast, but what were the other results?

“We plan on automating 90% of our power and environmental alarms and reducing human monitoring with Resolve. Resolve’s automation provides what I like to call an avoidance of work. We have a situation where we have thousands of false positive alarms. Each alarm needs to make sure the circuits are up and running. This previously had to be handled manually. Now, Resolve is handling thousands and we are down to 15 or 20 tickets a month which actually need to be handled manually,” Mark continued.

Windstream is one of the largest telecommunications companies and provides services particularly to rural communities. Resolve’s automation and orchestration platform provides their network operations team with valid alerts, eliminating redundant tickets, stopping the unneeded or cavalier send of technicians, and scaled back man hours.

Mark quantified, “Last year, in 8 months, we saved 13,000 hours of work with Resolve.”

With Mean time to Ticket and Mean time to Resolution cut in half, Mark’s team realized the benefits of Resolve in a few months. How did Mark attain such a seemingly unattainable goal? By automating bite-sized chunks.

Resolve reduces noise and false alerts – empowering IT operations, Network operations, or Security operations teams to focus on more severe alerts. Applying automation to handle the minor incidents or threats, the Atlanta audience learned they too can do more with less.

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