SOAR TECHNOLOGY: Explained, Important capabilities, SOAR VS SIEM, Key use cases

SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response) is a solution stack of compatible software programs that allow an organization to collect data about security threats from multiple sources and respond to low-level security events without human assistance. The goal of using a SOAR stack is to improve the efficiency of physical and digital security operations. The term, which was coined by the research firm Gartner, can be applied to compatible products and services that help define, prioritize, standardize and automate incident response functions.

“Gartner defines SOAR as technologies that allow companies to collect all types of security threats, alerts, and data from various sources and analyse and respond to them in one place. Using SOAR tools, organizations can identify and eliminate duplicates and false positives, which allows security analysts to focus on real threats most efficiently. By leveraging human expertise and the time savings afforded by automation and orchestration, decision-making and reaction times can be significantly faster”

The three most important capabilities of SOAR technologies are:

Threat and vulnerability management: It supports the remediation of vulnerabilities across their lifecycle and provides formalized workflow, reporting and collaboration capabilities.

Security incident response: It supports how an organization plans, manages, tracks, and coordinates the response to a security incident.

Security operations automation: It enables the automation and orchestration of workflows, processes, policy execution and reporting

SOAR VS SIEM

Both SIEM and SOAR intend to make the lives of the entire security team better through increased efficiency and efficacy. While data collection is incredibly meaningful, SIEM solutions tend to produce more alerts than SecOps teams can expect to respond to. SOAR enables the security team to handle the alert load quickly and efficiently, leaving time to focus on core tasks.

Do we need SIEM, SOAR or both?

Like ice cream and cake, SIEM and SOAR are great on their own, but better together. SIEM excels at collecting and storing data in a useful form, while SOAR’s strengths lie in making use of that data, saving analysts the trouble of manually investigating and responding to each and every suspicious event they find.

KEY USE CASES

The Key Use cases defined for the SOAR market are that it should include all the enterprises which can automatically resolve alerts enabling the organization to cost-effectively close alerts, gather metrics and run reports automatically to reduce the time spend by the security analysts for these activities, Security Orchestration for Automated Défense to respond to security alerts

SOAR selection in 2019 and beyond is being driven by use cases such as:

SOC optimization
Threat monitoring and response
Threat investigation and response
Threat intelligence management

SOAR TECHNOLOGY: Explained, Important capabilities, SOAR VS SIEM, Key use cases