SOAR Solutions: Everything You Need To Know (FAQs)
What Is Security Orchestration, Automation, And Response (SOAR)?
SOAR solutions collect and analyze information from all the tools in your cybersecurity stack. By centralizing this data, they make it easier to identify threats and understand their potential impact, so your SOC team can remediate them more efficiently.
How Do SOAR Security Tools Work?
SOAR tools typically follow three stages:
- Data gathering: Through deep integration with your existing infrastructure and tools, the SOAR solution gathers data about what’s happening across your network. It’s important that the solution has unrestricted access, so it doesn’t miss any threats.
- Data analysis: The SOAR solution uses machine learning to sift through the vast quantities of data that it has access to and identify any anomalous behaviors/activities that could indicate a system is under attack.
- Response: When a threat is identified, the SOAR solution notifies the SOC team and automatically remediates it using built-in, pre-configured playbooks. If the threat is too complex to remediate automatically, the solution guides the SOC team through manual remediation workflows.
What Is The Difference Between SOAR And SIEM?
SIEM stands for Security Information and Event Management. These tools collect and log cybersecurity event data from across your network, including your servers, applications, and databases. If it detects anything suspicious or anomalous, the SIEM solution sends an alert to the SOC team.
SOAR solutions work in a similar way – they start by monitoring and detecting networks events. However, rather than just sending a notification, SOAR tools can automatically respond to and remediate the issue.
Some issues are too complex for SOAR solutions to automatically remediate. In these instances, the tool will triage the threat, then notify the SOC team and guide them through the remediation process.
Who Is SOAR Best Suited For?
SOAR solutions require ongoing effort, engagement, and support—as well as analysts that can handle setting up playbooks, automating workflows, and following best practices.
Because of this, SOAR solutions tend to be best suited to large organizations or Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) with an experienced security team, and which want to streamline their already-established incident analysis and response processes.
The Best SOAR Solutions For Business: Shortlist FAQs
Why should you trust this Shortlist?
This article was written by Alex Zawalnyski, the Copy Manager at Expert Insights, who works along software experts to research, write, fact-check, and edit articles relating to B2B cyber security and technology solutions. This article has been technically reviewed by our technical researcher, Laura Iannini, who has experience with a range of cybersecurity platforms and conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.
Research for this guide included:
- Interviewing executives in the SOAR space, as well as the wider SecOps industry, for first-hand insight into the challenges and strengths of different solutions
- Researching and demoing solutions in the SOAR space and wider SecOps category over several years
- Speaking to several organizations of all sizes about their SOAR challenges and the features that are most useful to them
- Reading third-party and customer reviews from multiple outlets, including paid industry reports
This guide is updated at least every 3 months to review the vendors included and ensure that the features listed are up to date.
Who is this Shortlist for?
SOAR solutions are best suited to large enterprises or MSSPs that have a dedicated, experienced, in-house security team. As such, we’ve written this Shortlist for larger organizations looking to streamline already-established processes for event analysis and incident response.
How was the Shortlist picked?
When considering SOAR solutions, we evaluated providers based on the following criterion:
Features: Based on conversations with vendors, end customers, and our own testing, we selected the following key features:
- Alert triage and investigation: SOAR solutions gather a vast amount of information from across your entire network. It is unfeasible for a human to effectively analyze this amount of data and identify anomalies. As such, a strong SOAR solution must analyze data automatically and only alert admins to critical events and those that require human input.
- Playbooks: Rather than requiring a user to decide how best to respond to incidents, the best SOAR tools use pre-built and customizable playbooks to respond. When a known attack type is encountered, the solution can follow the steps as prescribed in a playbook to ensure that it’s responding efficiently and effectively.
- Reporting dashboard: Effective SOAR solutions must offer a reporting dashboard that highlights key findings and presents information in an accessible way. This should include a record of remediation events that have happened without any need for human interaction.
- Market perception: We reviewed each vendor included on the Shortlist to ensure they are reliable, trusted providers in the market. We reviewed their documentation, third-party analyst reports, and—where possible—we have interviewed executives directly.
- Customer usage: We use market share as a metric when comparing vendors and aim to represent both high market share vendors and challenger brands with innovative capabilities. We have spoken to end customers and reviewed customer case studies, testimonials, and end user reviews.
- Product heritage: Finally, we have looked at where a product has come from in the market, including when companies were founded, their leadership team, their mission statements, and their successes. We have also considered product updates and how regularly new features are added. We have ensured all vendors are credible leaders with a solution that we would be happy to use ourselves.
Based on our experience in the SecOps and broader cybersecurity market, we have also considered several other factors, such as the benefit of consolidating multiple features into a single platform, the quality of the admin interface, the customer support on offer, and other use cases.
This list is designed to be a selection of the best SOAR providers. Many leading solutions have not been included in this list, with no criticism intended.
