SOAR in cybersecurity stands for security orchestration, automation, and response. It is a technology that helps coordinate, automate, and execute tasks between tools and various people.
It also allows the company to respond quickly to cybersecurity attacks and improve its complete security posture. This SOAR tool uses the security “playbooks” that are automated and coordinate the workflows of any number of disparate security tools and human tasks. This gives teams the ability to decide how SOAR can accomplish high-level objectives, such as saving time, reducing the number of IT staff, or freeing up current staff to engage in creative projects.
SOAR combines three software capabilities: the management of threats and vulnerabilities, responding to security incidents, and automating security operations. SOAR security, therefore, provides a top-to-bottom threat management system. Threats are identified and then a response strategy is implemented. The system is then automated—to the extent possible to make it run more efficiently.
An effective SOAR system can be used as a valuable tool to alleviate the strain on IT teams.
Security Orchestration
Security orchestration connects and integrates disparate internal and external tools via built-in or custom integrations and application programming interfaces. Connected systems may include vulnerability scanners, endpoint protection products, user and entity behavior analytics, firewalls, intrusion detection and intrusion prevention systems (IDSes/IPSes).
It also includes security information and event management (SIEM) platforms, endpoint security software, external threat intelligence feeds, and other third-party sources.
The more data gathered through these sources, the better the chance of detecting threats, along with assembling more complete context and improving collaboration. The tradeoffs, however, are more alerts and more data to ingest and analyze. Where security orchestration collects and consolidates data to initiate response functions, security automation takes action.
A SOAR system enables cybersecurity and IT teams to combine efforts as they address the overall network environment in a more unified manner. The tools that SOAR uses can combine internal data and external information about threats. Teams can then use this information to ascertain the issues at the root of each security situation.
Security Automation
Fed by the data and alerts collected from security orchestration, security automation ingests and analyzes data and creates repeated, automated processes to replace manual processes. Tasks previously performed by analysts, such as vulnerability scanning, log analysis, ticket checking and auditing capabilities, can be standardized and automatically executed by SOAR platforms.
Using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to decipher and adapt insights from analysts, SOAR automation can prioritize threats, make recommendations and automate future responses.
Alternatively, automation can elevate threats if human intervention is needed.
Playbooks are essential to the success of SOAR in cybersecurity. Prebuilt or customized playbooks are predefined automated actions. Multiple SOAR playbooks can be connected to complete complex actions.
For example, if a malicious URL is found in an employee email and identified during a scan, a playbook can be instituted that blocks the email, alerts the employee of the potential phishing attempt and blocklists the IP address of the sender. SOAR tools can also trigger follow-up investigative actions by security teams, if necessary.
In terms of the phishing example, follow-up could include searching other employee inboxes for similar emails and blocking them and their IP addresses, if found.
The automation features of SOAR set it apart from other security systems because they help eliminate the need for manual steps, which can be time-consuming and tedious. Security automation can accomplish a wide range of tasks, including managing user access and query logs. Automation can also be used as a tool for orchestration. As an orchestration solution, SOAR can automate tasks that would normally necessitate multiple security tools.
Security Response
Security Response offers a single view for analysts into the planning, managing, monitoring and reporting of actions carried out after a threat is detected. This single view enables collaboration and threat intelligence sharing across security, network and systems teams.
It also includes post-incident response activities, such as case management and reporting.
Both orchestration and automation provide the foundation for the response feature of a SOAR system. With SOAR, an organization can manage, plan, and coordinate how they react to a security threat.
The automation feature of SOAR in cybersecurity eliminates the risk of human error. This makes responses more accurate and cuts down on the amount of time it takes for security issues to be remedied.
SOAR capabilities and use cases in cybersecurity
The term SOAR, coined by Gartner in 2015, initially stood for security operations, analytics and reporting. It was updated to its current form in 2017, with Gartner defining SOAR’s three main capabilities as the following:
- Threat and vulnerability management technologies that support the remediation of vulnerabilities, providing formalized workflow, reporting and collaboration capabilities.
- Security incident response technologies that support how an organization plans, manages, tracks and coordinates the response to a security incident.
- Security operations automation technologies that support the automation and orchestration of workflows, processes, policy execution and reporting.
Gartner expanded the definition further, refining SOAR’s technology convergence to the following:
- Security incident response platforms. Includes capabilities such as vulnerability management, case management, incident management, workflows, incident knowledge base, auditing and logging capabilities, reporting and more.
- Security orchestration and automation. Includes integrations, workflow automation, playbooks, playbook management, data gathering, log analysis and account lifecycle management.
- Threat intelligence platforms. Includes threat intelligence aggregation, analysis and distribution; alert context enrichment; and threat intelligence visualization.
Benefits of SOAR in Cybersecurity
SOAR platforms offer many cybersecurity benefits for enterprise security operations (SecOps) teams. They include the following:
Faster incident detection and reaction times
The volume and velocity of security threats and events are constantly increasing. SOAR’s improved data context, combined with automation, can lower the mean time to detect, or MTTD, and speed up the mean time to respond, or MTTR.
By detecting and responding to threats more quickly — through automated playbooks, when available — their effects can be lessened.
Better threat context
By integrating more data from a wider array of tools and systems, SOAR platforms can offer more context, better analysis, and up-to-date threat information.
Simplified management
SOAR platforms consolidate various security systems’ dashboards into a single interface. This helps SecOps and other teams by centralizing information and data handling, simplifying management and saving time.
Scalability
Scaling time-consuming manual processes can be a drain on employees and even impossible to keep up with as security event volume grows. SOAR’s orchestration, automation and workflows can meet scalability demands more easily.
Boosted analyst productivity
Automating lower-level threats augments SecOps and security operations center teams’ responsibilities, enabling them to prioritize tasks more effectively and respond to threats that require human intervention more quickly.
Streamlined operations, reporting and collaboration
Standardized procedures and playbooks that automate lower-level tasks enable SecOps teams to respond to more threats in the same time period. These automated workflows also ensure the same standardized remediation efforts are applied organization-wide, across all systems.
SOAR platforms’ reporting and analysis also consolidate information quickly in cybersecurity. This enables better data management processes and better response efforts to update existing security policies and programs for more effective security. A SOAR platform’s centralized dashboard can also improve information-sharing across disparate enterprise teams, enhancing communication and collaboration.
In many instances, augmenting cybersecurity analysts with SOAR tools can also lower costs. As opposed to manually performing all threat analysis, detection and response efforts.
Challenges of SOAR
SOAR is not a cure-all technology, nor is it a standalone system. It is a complementary technology, not a replacement for other security tools. It is also not a replacement for human analysts but instead can augment their skills and workflows for more effective incident detection and response.
SOAR platforms should be part of a defense-in-depth cybersecurity strategy, especially as they require the input of other security systems to successfully detect threats.
Other potential drawbacks of SOAR include the following:
- Failure to remediate a broader security strategy.
- Conflated expectations.
- Integration complexities.
- Deployment and management complexity.
- Lack of or limited metrics.
SOAR vs. SIEM in Cybersecurity
Both SOAR and SIEM (security information and event management) detect security issues and collect data regarding the nature of the problem. They also deal with notifications that security personnel can use to address concerns. However, there are significant differences between them.
SOAR collects data and alerts security teams using a centralized platform similar to SIEM, but SIEM only sends alerts to security analysts. SOAR security, on the other hand, takes it a step further by automating the responses. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to learn pattern behaviors, which enables it to predict similar threats before they happen.
This makes it easier for IT security staff to detect and address threats.
Separate from SOAR platforms, SIEM platforms aggregate log and event data from multiple tools, technologies and processes. These help organizations detect, analyze, and respond to potential security incidents.
SIEM combines security information management or SIM, and security event management, or SEM, into a single platform. SIEM tools use collection agents to gather information from devices, servers, infrastructure, networks and systems, as well as security tools such as firewalls, antimalware, DNS servers, data loss prevention tools, secure web gateways and IDSes/IPSes. The gathered information is used by SIEMs to identify potential abnormalities and threats. SIEMs then alert security teams about any security events.
SIEM features vary, but most include log management, data correlation, analytics, dashboards and alerting.
SOAR, SIEM, and XDR
SOAR, SIEM and XDR tools share some core functions, but each has its unique features and use cases.
Security information and event management (SIEM) solutions collect information from internal security tools, aggregate it in a central log, and flag anomalies. SIEMs are mainly used to record and manage large volumes of security event data.
SIEM technology first emerged as a compliance reporting tool. SOCs adopted SIEMs when they realized SIEM data could inform cybersecurity operations. SOAR solutions arose to add the security-focused features most standard SIEMs lack, like orchestration, automation, and console functions.
Extended detection and response (XDR) solutions collect and analyze security data from endpoints, networks, and the cloud. Like SOARs, they can automatically respond to security incidents.
However, XDRs are capable of more complex and comprehensive incident response automation than SOARs. XDRs can also simplify security integrations, often requiring less expertise or expense than SOAR integrations. Some XDRs are pre-integrated single-vendor solutions, while others can connect security tools from multiple vendors.
XDRs are often used for real-time threat detection, incident triage, and automated threat hunting.
SecOps teams in large companies often use all of these tools together. However, providers are blurring the lines between them, rolling out SIEM solutions that can respond to threats and XDRs with SIEM-like data logging. Some security experts believe XDR may one day absorb the other tools, similar to how SOAR once consolidated its predecessors.
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