Security Orchestration, Automation, And Response (SOAR) Buyers’ Guide 2024

State of the market: SOAR solutions enable organizations to respond more effectively to security incidents by coordinating and automating tasks across various teams and tools, streamlining event analysis, and automating response processes. In fact, using a SOAR solution can improve incident response times by as much as 83%.

The SOAR market was valued at USD 1.6 billion in 2023 and is expected to exhibit 15% CAGR between 2024 and 2032, reaching a market value of USD 5.7 billion

Growth has been driven by the need for rapid incident response to deal with increasing numbers of cybersecurity threats, amid a cybersecurity skills shortage

While the SOAR market continues to grow, SOAR tools are facing an evolution as organizations cry out for less complexity, and more consolidation and standardization

In this guide, we’ll give you our top recommendations on choosing the right SOAR provider. We’ll also cover what features to look for in a SOAR tool, the benefits and challenges of implementing one, and what future trends you should keep tabs on in the SOAR space.

How SOAR Works: SOAR tools can be deployed in on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments. Once deployed, they integrate with existing tools and data sources across your network and aggregate event data from all those sources.

They then analyze that data – often using machine learning techniques – to identify any unusual, suspicious, or risky activity that could indicate a cyber threat.

Once a SOAR solution has identified a threat, it notifies the SOC team via triaged alerts, and responds to the incident by either:

Automatically remediating the threat using pre-configured playbooks and workflows (this works for threats that are more straightforward to remediate)

Guiding the SOC team through manual remediation workflows (this works for more complex threats)

Benefits of SOAR: “SIEM and SOAR are foundational components of security operations,” Patrick Coughlin, SVP of Global Technical Sales at Splunk, tells Expert Insights.

The main use cases of SOAR are to execute repetitive response process for common security issues such as phishing, and to automate already-established processes to improve consistency and efficiency across incident detection and response.

Because of this, standalone SOAR tools are best suited to organizations with a dedicated, experienced in-house security team.

These teams can reap the following benefits from a SOAR tool:

Centralized view of activity: As they collect event data in one place, SOAR tools provide a single platform for managing security operations and incident response.

Improved threat detection: By integrating threat intelligence from multiple sources and displaying it in one place, SOAR tools reduce siloes and, in turn, reduce the likelihood of a security incident taking place unnoticed.

Improved incident response (MTTR): SOAR tools reduce response times by triaging alerts and automating responses to security threats.

Increased productivity: By automating and reducing the number of repetitive tasks and operations in progress, SOAR solutions allow security teams to focus on higher-value activities.

Improved scalability: SOAR enables organizations to expand their security efforts without having to hire more security staff, as the majority of incidents can be handled automatically by a SOAR tool.

Potential cost optimization: SOAR solutions cover playbook creation, alert handling/triage, reporting, and sometimes even analyst training, meaning that organizations can use one platform for each of these processes rather than investing in multiple tools.

Common SOAR Challenges: SOAR solutions are often a complex investment, and there are some challenges to be aware of before you buy:

Complexity: Although some SOAR solutions offer out-of-the-box integrations, it can still be difficult and resource intensive to connect SOAR tools to all your existing infrastructure, particularly if you’re integrating a large number of siloed, disparate tools. This means you need to invest in a highly skilled team to configure and manage the tool effectively. We recommend enrolling the necessary team members on any training offered by your SOAR provider to help them get the most out of the platform.

Integration issues: Teams commonly have trouble integrating their SOAR solution with third-party tools and custom connectors. If these integrations aren’t properly configured, the SOAR tool won’t pull data accurately from other sources, which can lead to an overwhelming number of alerts and false positives. Again, we recommend utilizing your provider’s training and support offerings.

Over-reliance on SOAR: Unfortunately, there’s no “silver bullet” solution to security. SOAR tools automate a lot of manual, repetitive tasks so that identifying and responding to security incidents requires as little human attention as possible, but there will always be some tasks that need to be carried out by a person. We recommend scheduling your team so that there’s always someone available should an incident arise that the SOAR tool cannot remediate alone.

Inability to define security strategy: SOAR only covers a portion of the security strategy within an organization. To define a complete security strategy, we recommend that you identify the greatest cybersecurity risks to your business and assess their likely impact, then optimize your security posture to address those risks. But on top of that, you need to make sure security is a priority across the whole organization, not just for your SOC team. Implementing a strong security awareness training program can help you do this.

Cost: Finally, implementing and maintaining a SOAR solution can be costly – especially for smaller organizations – both in terms of initial setup and ongoing maintenance.

Best SOAR Providers: Our team of cybersecurity analysts has put together a shortlist of the best SOAR providers currently on the market, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:

The Top 11 SOAR Solutions

The Top 11 SIEM Solutions

The Top 10 Extended Detection And Response (XDR) Solutions

The Top 11 IT Service Management Solutions

Features Checklist: When comparing SOAR solutions, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:

Scalability: This is one of the most important features of a SOAR solution – it must be able to adapt as you add more tools to your infrastructure or adjust to new security or user needs.

Customization: You should be able to customize the dashboard for at-a-glance insights into the metrics that are most important to you, and you should be able to create custom rules.

API-first architecture and integrations: Without being able to integrate with other platforms, a SOAR solution is essentially useless. Make sure your chosen tool integrates easily with a wide range of popular tools and offers the ability to add custom integrations via API.

Automation playbooks: Playbooks are predefined workflows for automating common security tasks and incident response processes. For your SOC team to fully take advantage of a SOAR solution, it should offer customizable playbooks.

Reporting and analytics: Your solution should use machine learning to analyze data and detect threats, and it should present its findings in comprehensive, accessible reports.

Collaboration tools: Look for features for cross-team collaboration, such as chat integrations, shared dashboards, and case management functionality, that enable team members to work together on an incident.

Compliance support: Your solution must meet all regulatory requirements relevant to your organization, and you should be able to generate compliance reports.

Further Recommendations: While making sure a product offers specific key features is important, it’s not the only thing you should consider when comparing SOAR solutions. Here are our top tips outside of a feature checklist to help you find the right SOAR tool for your business:

For large enterprises: Choose a solution that offers robust scalability – can it support larger data sets and perform to the same standard as your organization grows? Additionally, you may want to compare the benefits of a standalone SOAR solution with those of a next-gen SIEM, ITSM, or XDR solution, which may be able to meet your SOAR requirements while serving a wider use case.

For small- and mid-sized organizations: Consider whether the cost of the solution – both in terms of monetary investment and the need to hire and retain skilled security staff – is worth the reward. Do you have existing response processes that can be orchestrated and automated? If not, you may wish to consider a managed detection and response (MDR) solution instead, which often include SOAR capabilities “behind the scenes”.

For effectiveness: Don’t expect that a SOAR solution will solve all your security problems out-of-the-box; you’ll need to dedicate time and resources to configuring the tool correctly. To help with that, make sure the SOAR solution offers high-quality, built-in integrations with most of the tools used within your organization.

For tackling complexity: We have two recommendations here. First, choose a vendor with readily available (ideally 24/7) support to help with configuration and ongoing maintenance. Second, use the vendor’s documentation and training resources to help your team get the most out of the solution.

Future Trends: The standalone SOAR market is relatively niche within the broader cybersecurity landscape, with the solution’s complexity driving some organizations to look for orchestration and automation capabilities within other tools, such as XDR and ITSM platforms.

Because of this – and despite the market’s projected growth – some argue that SOAR is on its way out. In their 2024 Hype Cycle for ITSM, for example, Gartner suggests that conventional IT service management practices, including SOAR, are becoming “less relevant”.

In order to stay relevant, SOAR solutions need to evolve as the market continues to grow. There are three key trends that we expect to see in the near future.

Firstly, as with many tools in the cybersecurity space, we can expect SOAR solutions to leverage recent advances in generative AI and ML-based behavioral analysis to enhance real-time detection and automated response capabilities. This will enable teams to pick up on events that might currently slip through the cracks.

Some experts also believe that SOC teams will be able to utilize genAI “assistants” for analyzing incident reports and assessing vulnerabilities through natural language queries. While this won’t solve the complexity of setting up and maintaining a SOAR tool, it could help less technical SOC teams respond more quickly and effectively to detected incidents.

“AI will bring down the barrier of entry. We can start to bring in more people that don’t have to come from technical [backgrounds]. Just like other departments in the organization, you can bring a diversity of thought and background into the Security Operations Center.” – Patrick Coughlin, SVP Global Technical Sales, Splunk

Secondly, SOAR tools are increasingly being integrated with SIEM and EDR/XDR platforms. As more organizations call for consolidation and standardization of their security tools, we can only expect this trend to continue. This could also make SOAR more accessible to smaller organizations that want the automation offered by SOAR, without the complexity of configuring a standalone SOAR tool.

Finally, as more organizations move towards a cloud-based infrastructure for improved scalability and flexibility, we expect to see more cloud-native SOAR solutions becoming available.

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