A comprehensive security strategy needs to go beyond just identifying weaknesses and loopholes. It needs to take proactive steps to improve and strengthen security strategies. A SOAR solution can help organizations build on their existing strengths, recognize areas that are operating successfully, and identify opportunities for future growth.
A SOAR solution can help organizations align security goals in an efficient and effective way. It ensures that they don’t just address vulnerabilities but can also improve overall cybersecurity capabilities as an organization grows and evolves over time.
What Is SOAR?
SOAR stands for Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response. This is a strategic planning framework that allows organizations to depict and align their current abilities with their future potential. This might include highlighting staffing shortages or addressing bottlenecks in security performance.
SOAR helps security teams to coordinate incident response actions and can cut out many of the repetitive, time-consuming manual tasks needed for the investigation of security events. It also enables automation between various security tools, leading to faster, more efficient threat detection and incident response.
A SOAR platform can collect and analyze security data from multiple sources, allowing security teams to prioritize threats, coordinate responses, and reduce manual workloads. These types of tools can help security teams stay on top of threat intelligence, automate routine tasks, and respond to cyber incidents more effectively. By improving efficiency, consistency, and response times, SOAR enhances an organization’s overall cybersecurity posture, making it more resilient against evolving threats.
According to Gartner, the core capabilities of a SOAR solution must include:
- Highly customizable workflow process management that enables repeatable automated tasks to be turned into playbooks that run in isolation or joined together into more sophisticated workflows
- The ability to store (locally or in a third-party system) incident management data to support SecOps investigations
- Manually instigated and automated triggers that augment human security analyst operators to carry out operational tasks consistently
- A mechanism to collate and better utilize threat intelligence
- Support for a broad range of existing security technologies that support improved analyst efficiency and acts as an abstraction layer between the desired outcomes and the custom-made set of solutions in place in your environment
What Problems Does SOAR Solve?
Problem
SOC analysts only have so much time in a day to respond to events. Due to the global talent shortage in this field, security teams can’t always grow to match the demand.
Solution
- SOAR can give organizations the ability to scale up their security operations and handle incidents more efficiently without needing to hire additional staff or overwork existing staff.
- If an issue happens to be too complicated for a SOAR to address automatically, it can still provide guidance on how to perform manual remediation.
Problem
Time-consuming for SOC teams to manually remediate all issues, especially if the same type of problem comes up often.
Solution
- SOAR solutions use playbooks to automatically remediate more common issues, eliminating the need to perform repetitive tasks.
- These playbooks can also be combined into complex workflows, allowing for flexibility when automating solutions.
Problem
Alert fatigue from having to manually sift through large volumes of events can lead to missing critical alerts and SOC team burnout.
Solution
- SOAR tools can prioritize events so that teams can focus on what matters most.
- When security staff aren’t frustrated or overwhelmed, they can perform better to analyze and remediate higher priority issues.
Problem
Lack of integration between tools in an organization’s security stack can be a burden for security teams to manage.
Solution
- Many SOAR solutions offer integrations with a variety of other tools. Some even support custom integrations in case an organization needs functionality beyond what’s available out of the box.
Problem
Security teams need readable and easily accessible feeds for threat intelligence.
Solution
- SOAR solutions take streams of threat intelligence from multiple sources and present it in one centralized location, reducing silos.
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