Relevance of SOAR in the current threat landscape
Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) technology helps coordinate, execute and automate tasks between various people and tools all within a single platform. This allows organizations to not only quickly respond to cybersecurity attacks but also observe, understand and prevent future incidents, thus improving their overall security posture.
SOAR is designed to operate under three primary software capabilities: threat and vulnerability management, security incident response, and security operations automation. Threat and vulnerability management (orchestration) covers technologies that help amend cyberthreats, while security operations automation (automation) relates to the technologies that enable automation and orchestration within operations. Please refer below for a high-level SOAR workflow:
SOAR platforms offer many benefits for enterprise security operations teams.
1) 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 bring lower mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR). By detecting and responding to threats more quickly, their impact can be lessened.
2) 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.
3) 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.
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4) 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.
5) Boosting analysts' productivity. Automating lower-level threats augments SecOps and security operations center (SOC) teams' responsibilities, enabling them to prioritize tasks more effectively and respond to threats that require human intervention more quickly.
6) Streamlining operations. 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.
7) Reporting and collaboration. SOAR platforms' reporting and analysis consolidate information quickly, enabling 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.
8) Lowered costs. In many instances, augmenting security analysts with SOAR tools can lower costs, as opposed to manually performing all threat analysis, detection and response efforts.
Ravi Bhushan