SOAR is an acronym thrown around a lot within the cybersecurity industry, but what does it really mean? SOAR stands for Security Orchestration, Automation and Response.

SOAR tools are the technologies used to orchestrate responses to security incidents and assign responsibilities between various tools and individuals within a security team or enterprise.

The working principles of a best-in-class SOAR technology include:

• A combination of security orchestration and automation solutions that automates incident response and threat investigation processes
• Provision of an interactive centralized dashboard to simplify the security management process for security teams and non-technical staff
• Simplifying case management and efficient response to security incidents with a priority ticketing system

The Benefits of Implementing SOAR

The upsides of utilizing SOAR capabilities are:

Automating Repetitive Tasks

Human error in the workplace is responsible for 95% of security incidents in cloud environments, according to Gartner. The high failure rate is due to repetitive manual tasks, which increase the likelihood of an oversight or mistake. Threat investigations and responses are performed faster and at scale across complex or expansive IT infrastructures with SOAR capabilities.

AI Enables New Security Initiatives to Protect Digital Infrastructure

The integration of machine learning in SOAR solutions enables the technology to dive deep into threats, analyze them, and gain contextual knowledge of their capabilities. The insight SOAR provides the foundation for fine-tuning incident response strategies to improve overall IT security.

Orchestrate Security Incidents to Capable Hands

SOAR technology automates the orchestration process and routes security incidents to the analyst or expert within a team with the best credentials to handle a particular incident. SOAR ensures teams get only the essential information needed to take action.

SOAR Use Cases

Managing Security Operations

As a security operations manager, SOAR technologies handle multiple tasks such as vulnerability management, security certificate management, endpoint diagnostics, and reporting activities. The broad range of management services SOAR offers means enterprises with varying security capacities can deploy SOAR for security management operations.

For example, an enterprise with a dedicated, experienced security team can rely on SOAR to send timely reminders on expiring security certificates so the appropriate individual can handle that task. In other enterprises with limited security operations, SOAR can serve as an additional tool for managing vulnerabilities and dealing with security incidents through automation.

Threat Hunting and Incident Response

The process of threat hunting is more than simply discovering threats, it involves gaining insight into threat complexities using machine learning and other pattern recognition solutions. SOAR provides the tools for automating the threat hunting, analysis, and response processes for enterprises regardless of their security team’s experience levels.

Use cases for experienced security teams revolve around gaining contextual insight into indicators of compromise captured across diverse threat hunting technologies. Security teams also rely on SOAR technology to analyze big data sets from expansive enterprise infrastructures as they can extract and analyze data from both cloud-based and on-premise IT assets.

Use cases for enterprises with limited security capacity to take advantage of the orchestration and automation capabilities of a SOAR technology or solution. Under this category, enterprises rely on automation to discover threats and determine the response required to mitigate discovered threats. These enterprises also rely heavily on comprehensive dashboards and playbooks to understand the nature of threats, their targets, and the severity of a security incident.

Automating Security

Automation and the option to rely on superior analytical powers SOAR provides are a major reason why enterprises choose to use a SOAR solution. Due to the always-changing nature of IT security and the threats cybercriminals deploy, relying on the automated support SOAR provides to discover new threats are the reasons why security teams deploy SOAR technology.

Conclusion

SOAR tools continue to be adopted by enterprises looking to increase efficiency and provide greater threat hunting capabilities. Gartner mentions SOAR capabilities as a top feature for Managed Security Service Providers. If your organization is looking to implement SOAR capabilities or needs an outsourced provider with these competencies, reach out for a no-cost consultation with a Datashield professional today.