Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms help incident response teams manage large tool sets in active threat scenarios. SOAR technology enables organizations to streamline time-consuming security operations when it matters most.
Most organizations have dozens of different security tools, and large enterprises may have more than fifty. Many of these tools are not designed to work together. Security operations personnel must integrate them manually whenever a security incident occurs.
Every second counts when responding to a cyberattack. Manually collecting data from one security application to use in another drags down productivity and increases risk. SOAR platforms provide a centralized console for creating and running optimized threat response playbooks.
How does SOAR Improve Incident Response Workflows?
SOAR technology streamlines the process of triaging alerts coming from multiple different security tools. It also enhances the interoperability of security applications that were not designed to work together.
This allows the security team to improve key performance metrics like Mean Time-to-Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time-to-Respond (MTTR). Instead of manually carrying out dozens of different operations on individual tools, security teams can manage incident response from a single place.
The less time attackers spend in your environment, the less damage they can do. Shorter data breach lifecycles are associated with lower overall breach costs. Automating incident response offers clear value to security-conscious leaders who want to make a difference.
How does SOAR Work?
SOAR solutions combine three different security tools into a single platform. Prior to 2015, the three core functionalities of SOAR were available only separately:
1. Security Orchestration
This functionality acts as a centralized console that coordinates all of the different security tools and applications in the organization’s environment.
Even small organizations often have a large, complex set of security tools in their tech stack. Simple security processes can easily require managing multiple tools.
For example, an analyst who wants to investigate a phishing email may need to use a secure email gateway, a threat intelligence solution, and an endpoint antivirus to understand and address the threat. If those three tools come from different vendors, the analyst will have to manually copy information between them — a time-consuming and error-prone process.
SOAR technology allows security personnel to unify these tools under a single interface. It allows the organization to set clear, repeatable security operations as policies that execute on multiple tools at once.
2. Security Automation
Security operations typically involve a large volume of repetitive, low-impact tasks. An analyst might have to open and close support tickets, enrich security events with third-party data, and prioritize alerts to capture high-impact security incidents first.
All of these activities take valuable time away from more important strategic processes. Analysts who spend the entire day responding to an endless queue of alerts don’t have time to build proactive security policies or implement new solutions against emerging threats.
SOAR platforms let analysts automate playbook workflows so that multiple security tools can conduct operations as soon as the appropriate conditions are met.
For example, your Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution may issue an alert about suspicious activity on a company laptop. The alert triggers the SOAR to launch an automated playbook that opens a security ticket, draws relevant data from other security tools, and isolates the compromised laptop from the rest of the network.
3. Incident Response
SOAR platforms provide a comprehensive solution for incident response. By managing multiple tools in a centralized, automation-ready interface, analysts can dramatically reduce the time and effort that goes into incident response.
Often, the final task in a SOAR incident response workflow is alerting a human analyst to the event and providing a detailed overview of the actions taken. By the time an incident response professional receives the report, the most time-sensitive operations have already been completed.
If the situation calls for additional human intervention, the analyst can escalate the issue further. If not, the entire incident response workflow is complete, and the SOAR can then produce a compliance report demonstrating how the organization fared against that particular threat.
Benefits of SOAR Implementation
SOAR platforms streamline complex security workflows, allowing analysts to quickly and decisively respond to unauthorized activity on the network. Organizations that deploy SOAR technology enjoy significant advantages over those that don’t.
- Streamlined operations. Comprehensive playbooks provide an efficient framework for handling security events, ensuring analysts always know what comes next. Much less time gets wasted on indecision or uncertainty in high-stakes attack scenarios.
- Standardized processes. Security automation relieves analysts of the need to improvise ad-hoc responses to security events under investigation. Analysts have access to readymade playbooks that provide guidance during tense cyberattack scenarios.
- Reduced cyberattack risks. Reducing MTTD and MTTR metrics means lowering the overall risk cyberattacks pose to the organization. Quick response times ensure attacks have fewer chances to do serious damage.
- Secure alert correlations. SOAR lets analysts correlate alerts across the entire security tech stack. Suspicious activities on one part of the network can trigger a response from tools and devices across the entire IT environment.
- Lower overall security operations costs. Enterprise SOAR users spend less on compliance reporting, policy creation, alert handling, and analyst training. Highly streamlined implementations even help reduce costs related to shift management in the Security Operations Center (SOC).
SOAR or SIEM?
Many cybersecurity vendors describe SOAR and SIEM in similar terms. Both products collect data on security events and enable organizations to launch a coherent response. However, there are significant differences between the two.
SIEM platforms only send alerts to security analysts. It’s up to the analyst to log into the appropriate security tools and launch a coordinated response. SOAR security makes those security tools available in a unified interface and enhances them with automation.
SIEM solutions also generally work with log data. SOAR platforms can ingest data from data sources that SIEM does not cover — like vulnerability management scans, cloud security alerts, and others.
That doesn’t mean SOAR is a replacement for SIEM, though. Many enterprise security leaders use them both as complementary technologies.
Boost your Security Posture with SOAR Capabilities
Your SOAR implementation is only as good as the playbooks and policies you enforce. Crafting high quality SOAR playbooks requires in-depth knowledge of the entire security tech stack and deep visibility into the organization’s security risk profile.
Novawatch uses industry-leading smart SOAR technology from D3 to empower analysts with extensive, scalable automation and orchestration capabilities. Find out how our product experts can help you close security gaps and keep your most valuable assets protected.
