SOAR stands for Security Orchestration, Analytics, and Remediation, a term that was coined by Gartner when they announced a new cybersecurity technology category in 2019. By leveraging SOAR, you really can give your security operations center wings.
What is SOAR? - In short, SOAR is a security operations platform that uses stateful and machine-readable data from a variety of different sources. This provides SOC analysts with meaningful analysis and response capabilities, as well as management tools to make their tasks/decisions with speed. SOAR platforms give SOC analysts the actionable threat intelligence that they need to stay on top of ever-increasing workloads at scale and with speed.
They do this by enabling the remediation of tasks (think triage) using machine learning, logic, informed prioritization, and most importantly, context to their workflows.
SOAR vs. SIEM
SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) predates SOAR and has gradually evolved from being a simple correlation tool to a more advanced security analytics platform.
SIEM aggregates your security events and logs giving you visibility into your networks and IT infrastructure from a security perspective. While the aggregation of security events is essential, what we really need the ability to do is respond to events quickly.
SIEM lets you know that something bad is happening on your networks, but it is by leveraging your SOAR platform that you can act on that information. A SOAR platform gathers all of the data from your SIEM, threat intelligence feeds, and security applications. Then, they automate your responses (something a SIEM does not do) so that you can automate and coordinate security actions across your IT infrastructure.
Your SOAR enables the aggregation of threat intelligence from third-party sources and gives you the ability to build ‘playbooks’ of the activities you would engage in when a threat is detected.
How Can a SOAR Give Your SOC Wings?
Having data and information is great, but unless you can organize, process, and make it available to the people who can make decisions on it, it's a burden rather than a benefit. You often hear about SOCs suffering from information overload. This means that they are being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of information and alerts their systems are generating.
The bulk of a SOC analyst's job is to sort through information and organize it so decisions can be made. This is where a SOAR shines. It lightens the information load and frees up SOC analysts to focus on more important work, delivering a solid ROI in a short period of time. If they deliver 10-30% savings on your SOC team’s time, they are well worth investing in.
What Capabilities Does a SOAR Deliver?
Threat Intelligence
Most SOAR platforms can integrate with different security platforms and threat intelligence feeds so that they can be leveraged to respond to known threats quickly. These SOAR integrations are essential to the collation and correlation of threat data in a SOC to speed up analyst decisions.
Incident Response
SOC analysts continuously process and analyze incident and threat data. They need to be able to triage that data and prioritize the alerts so that they can respond quickly where they are needed most. A SOAR gives them the ability to do this.
Managing Vulnerabilities
An essential part of a SOC’s job is managing the vulnerabilities in the IT infrastructure they monitor. Vulnerability alerting needs to be triaged and managed in a priority-based way. SOAR platforms let an analyst triage these alerts based on vulnerability data.
Endpoint Incident Management
Once security alerts have been triaged, an analyst needs to be able to dig deeper into the incident and investigate it, often monitoring the behavior of the endpoint involved in the incident. Endpoint detection and response is a critical part of SOAR.
Managing Playbooks
An important part of SOAR is the creation and management of the incident response playbooks. They enable a SOC to streamline their processes, making them more effective when quickly responding to events.
SOAR Is an Important Part Of Any SOC
The daily information and administrative burdens of security management, combined with the constantly evolving and growing threat of a cyber attack, put enormous pressure on SOCs. This is especially true for organizations operating in tightly-regulated industries that cannot afford the reputational damage and operational disruption that a cyberattack or data breach can cause.
A SOAR enables SOCs to take a much more effective approach to delivering security and an automated approach that is not limited by manual (labor-intensive) processes. Advanced SOAR capabilities like automation, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence help SOCs identify and respond to infiltrations and security incidents before those incidents can become a full-blown security crisis and infiltrators gain a foothold on their networks.
Reducing dwell time (the time it takes to detect an infiltration after the infiltration occurs) is a challenge for any security-focused organization. However, a SOAR can reduce dwell times with fast detection and remediation to contain threats as soon as they are identified.
Leveraging a SOAR platform to integrate the incident detection, response, and orchestration processes with automation dramatically boost the abilities of any SOC, as does putting threat visualization and reporting in one pane of glass. SOC teams love SOAR platforms because they provide a fast and accurate way to deal with large amounts of data, alerts, and incident alarms.
They also help SOC analysts to detect and remediate threats that could already be happening, and they act as a force multiplier. All of these SOAR capabilities make SOCs exponentially more efficient at doing their jobs and managing their daily workflows.
Contact Digital Hands
Digital Hands employs a deeply experienced team of cybersecurity professionals with the necessary experience. If you have any questions about SOAR or how it can help your business, get in touch with Digital Hands by calling (855) 511-5114 today.
