Cut the Clicks: Guidance for Implementing Your Custom Playbook

Why Custom Playbooks Are a High-ROI Security Investment

In cybersecurity, speed translates to cost savings. The faster a team can respond to an incident, a breach, or an alert, the faster the organization can mitigate damages and recover from losses. According to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report, the average cost of downtime for a large enterprise can be as much as $9,000 per minute. With that kind of price tag, minutes matter.

Improving critical security KPIs like Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) and Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) is fertile ground for reducing these costs. In an environment where security incidents are inevitable, this can yield reliable savings. A powerful strategy for improving these metrics is to implement automation through custom playbooks as part of a SOAR (Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response) strategy. These tailored frameworks, unique to your organization, detail automated processes in response to various incidents and threats for real, measurable improvements to your security operation.

In this blog, we’ll walk through the value and best practices in approaching the development of custom playbooks, guided by insights from the SecureOps team.

The Data Is Clear: Playbooks and Automation Deliver Results

The primary function of a customized playbook is to automate workflows, reduce manual analyst work, and align security actions with specific business needs. It is the "action" component of a security platform (the SOAR), distinct from the logging and event management of the SIEM. This integration requires careful consideration of the underlying next-generation SOC architecture to ensure seamless orchestration across all security tools and processes.

Conceptually, automating manual actions of security analysts will of course increase efficiency and improve response times, but the data bears this out as well.

According to IBM and then Ponemon Institute:

• Organizations with extensive automation identify and contain data breaches 80 days faster than those without. 
• Cost savings for companies with extensive automation was $1.9 million compared to organizations without
• Organizations using SOAR solutions were found to contain threats 4x faster

Automation Adoption Gap: Where Most SOCs Still Fall Short

Despite these clear advantages, many SOCs still lack this valuable element of security maturity. According to the 2024 SANS Detection and Response Survey, 64% of respondents have integrated automated response mechanisms. Meanwhile, 32.8% of security teams still take hours to respond to critical threats and 50% do not track core metrics like MTTD and MTTR.

Building custom automation playbooks is a high-ROI activity for improving business resilience and cutting security costs.

Where to Start: Eliminate Repetitive Analyst Tasks First

When developing a customized playbook, the best place to start is by eliminating the repetitive, manual tasks analysts perform to gather data or communicate information. There is a tremendous amount of copy-pasting, tab-switching, and form-filling in an analyst's day, and much of it can be automated away. This is especially true when enforcing the Zero Trust network controls that playbooks enforce, where consistent, repeatable actions across access verification and segmentation are prime candidates for automation.

Examples of automation opportunities include eliminating:

• Open an SSH terminal and log into the server
• Access the IT service management (ITSM) tool (like ServiceNow) to create an incident ticket
• Copy/paste the server name and alert details into the ticket
• Look up who is in the "Server Admin" group
• Assign the ticket to that group
• Searching OSINT data
• Taking action on an account or endpoint
• Sharing information with stakeholders

Using Automation to Enrich Alerts Before Human Review

Additionally, automation can enrich alerts before a human ever sees them, further reducing the time needed to respond. This is where log management automation becomes particularly valuable, as it provides the foundational data processing that makes these enrichment activities possible. Automation can be used to:

• Query the active directory to pull a user’s manager, department, and last password reset
• Query the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to see what other services are running on a particular server
• Query a threat intelligence feed to see if an IP address is a known threat

Andrew Morrison, Sr. SOC Manager at SecureOps, explains the impact, "A lot of the manual repetitive effort analysts have to do can be compressed. You can press one button and the automation can even take care of notifying stakeholders, starting communication channels, and summarizing the channel with relevant information. That saves hours, days, and months as you expand that over a course of the year. "

Don’t Wait for Perfect: Continuous Improvements for Your Playbook

Every click saved is a benefit to the security function, so cybersecurity leaders should not strive to create the “perfect” playbook right out of the gate. Rather, start with low hanging fruit and enter into a continuous improvement process from there.

Kevin Robert, Cyber Security Engineer at SecureOps, stressed how using a playbook, even if it is rudimentary to start, can inspire ideas for further refinement, "Sometimes when we release a playbook, it's just a first version, but it reveals a lot of opportunities for when we review the playbook later and try to improve it."

Once the initial, mechanical automations are in place, further development and refinement of your playbook should be a continuous process driven by clear feedback from analysts. Instead of periodic reviews every six months, playbooks should be actively monitored and improved based on both technical failures and analyst feedback.

How Analyst Feedback Drives Playbook Refinement

The analysts using your playbook will be the best source for clear, actionable deficiencies in the process. They’ll know where the friction remains and offer an informed perspective on where it can be improved.

Avoid Over-Automation: Keep Human Intelligence in the Loop

In the pursuit of efficiency and cost reduction, it is possible to go too far. When teams are measured exclusively by metrics like MTTR or alerts-closed-per-hour, there may be the temptation to create playbooks that run from start to finish with zero human intervention.

Cybersecurity leaders must strike a balance that removes manual tasks without removing human intelligence. This requires a process-driven automation approach that prioritizes systematic workflows over flashy AI solutions.

Andrew explains, “If you build a playbook to start closing alerts without any sort of human insight, depending on the criticality, that could definitely be a danger." An automated playbook is only as smart as the rules that govern it. The cybersecurity industry is renowned for contending with the ever-evolving tactics of adversaries, and the deep experience of a security analyst is still necessary. Over automation could prevent your team from seeing the big picture or subtle patterns that a human analyst would spot.

Andrew continued, “You still need human eyeballs. You still need a human brain. It's just you have to use automation to refine what you're going to use that human brain for."

Think of your playbooks as a force multiplier rather than a replacement.

What Analysts Should Still Own in an Automated SOC

Trained, experienced analysts should still be responsible for:

• Reviewing the enriched alert brief provided by the playbook
• Applying their experience, intuition, and business context to the response
• Making the critical decisions, such as escalation, identifying false positives, etc.

The division of responsibilities will be unique to each organization, and one approach may be too much or not enough depending on the particular circumstances of your industry, environment, or risk tolerance.

Looking Ahead to Agentic AI

The next major evolution for playbooks is already taking shape in Agentic AI. This technology will allow engineers and developers to use natural language to describe a desired process, and the AI will automatically build the playbook and the necessary tool integrations to realize it.

How Agentic AI Will Accelerate Playbook Development

This will be a major boon to security operations, allowing teams to develop, test, and improve automation playbooks with exceptional speed. As this technology matures, the balance between human intelligence and automation will shift even further, freeing up your most valuable analysts to focus on the complex, creative, and critical work of staying one step ahead of the adversary.

Ready to Build or Improve Your Custom Security Playbooks?

Interested in developing or improving the custom playbooks in your organization? SecureOps can help! Contact us today to learn more.