What is the overall purpose of security orchestration automation and response?

Published Date: October 17, 2022

Security orchestration, automation and response, or SOAR, technologies give organizations a single source for observing, understanding, deciding upon and acting on security incidents.

Gartner originally coined the term to describe the convergence of security orchestration and automation, security incident response platforms (SIRP) and threat intelligence platforms (TIPs). You might also see SOAR referred to as SA&O, although a true SOAR platform will go beyond just security automation (SA) and security automation and orchestration (SA&O) by integrating a full-function incident response capability as well.

SOAR has revolutionized security operations, specifically the way security operations teams manage, analyze and respond to alerts and threats. Without some type of security automation, security analysts end up manually dealing with a rising number of cyberattacks. And since they’re responsible for handling thousands (sometimes even millions) of alerts, incident response, remediation and recovery can take days or longer — and that’s if you have an adequate staff of qualified people. Globally, the industry is facing a severe shortage of cybersecurity talent. The number of unfilled cybersecurity jobs grew 350% between 2013 and 2021 — from 1 million to 3.5 million, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. In light of this, it’s possible that your security team may be missing real threats as they try to deal with issues quickly and on the fly.

That’s where SOAR comes in. SOAR solutions help clear out mundane tasks tying up your security administrators’ time using machine learning and automation, while also offering them orchestration across their security infrastructures to be more productive. It helps them streamline to handle more incidents, investigate the most important issues more deeply and broadly improve your organization’s overall security posture.

In this article, we’ll explore the various components of SOAR, discuss why SOAR is important for enterprises and how you can get the most value from your SOAR solution.

SOAR Overview

How does security automation work?

Security automation is the machine-based execution of security actions with the power to programmatically detect, investigate and remediate cyberthreats without the need for human intervention.

SA does much of the work for your security staff, so they no longer have to weed through and manually address every alert as it comes in. Security automation can:

• Detect threats in your environment
• Triage potential threats by following the steps, instructions and decision-making workflow taken by security analysts to investigate the event and determine whether it is a legitimate incident
• Determine whether to take action on the incident
• Contain and resolve the issue

All of that can happen in seconds, without any involvement from human staff. Repetitive, time-consuming actions are taken out of the hands of security analysts so they can focus on more important, value-adding work.

A SOAR solution will unify all your security tools, making sure they’re working in concert and helping free up your analysts’ valuable time.

What is security orchestration?

Security orchestration (SO) is the machine-based coordination of a series of interdependent security actions across a complex infrastructure. It ensures that all of your security tools — and even non-security tools — are working together, while automating tasks across products and workflows.

SO coordinates incident investigation, response and ultimately resolution. Additionally, it eliminates the need for security analysts to navigate multiple screens and systems, compiling everything in one place and displaying it on a single dashboard.

Security orchestration can:

• Provide context around security incidents: A security orchestration tool aggregates data from different sources to offer deeper insight. As such, you gain a comprehensive view of the entire environment.
  
• Allow for deeper, more meaningful investigations: Security analysts can stop managing alerts and start investigating why those incidents are occuring. Additionally, security orchestration tools typically offer highly interactive and intuitive dashboards, graphs and timelines, which can be useful during the investigative and response process.
• Improve collaboration: Additional parties, including analysts at different tiers, managers, the CTO and C-suite executives, legal teams and HR, may also need to get involved with certain types of security incidents.

Ultimately, orchestration increases the integration of your defenses, allowing your security team to automate complex processes, and maximize the value you receive from your security staff, processes and tools.

What is the difference between automation and orchestration?

Security automation is all about simplifying and making your security operations run more efficiently, while security orchestration connects all of your different security tools so that they feed into one another.

Security automation and security orchestration are terms that are often used interchangeably, but the two solutions actually serve very different roles. Among other things, security automation:

• Reduces the time it takes to detect and respond to repetitive incidents and false positives, so alerts don’t linger unaddressed for long periods of time.
• Frees security analysts’ time to focus on strategic tasks, like investigative research.

However, security automation is limited in that each playbook addresses a known scenario with a prescribed course of action.

Security orchestration, on the other hand, uses multiple automated tasks to execute a complete, complex process or workflow. Security orchestration:

• Allows you to share information easily.
• Enables multiple tools to respond to incidents as a group, even when the data is spread across a large network and multiple systems or devices.

In summary, security automation deals with an array of single tasks, while security orchestration connects and speeds up the process from beginning to end. They work best in concert — and security groups can maximize their efficiency and productivity when they adopt both methods.

SOAR Benefits and Use Cases

What are the benefits of SOAR?

Your security team is probably drowning in a proverbial sea of alerts, many of which are false positives and redundancies. SOAR technologies can alleviate many of those repetitive, mundane actions across the entire security threat lifecycle so your security team can focus on more important work.

SOAR enables you to:

• Integrate security, IT operations and threat intelligence tools: You can connect all your different security solutions — even tools from different vendors — to achieve a more comprehensive level of data collection and analysis.
• View everything in one place: Your security team gains access to a single console that provides all the information it needs to investigate and remediate incidents.
• Speed incident response: Because many actions are automated, a large percentage of incidents can be dealt with immediately and automatically, reducing mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond/repair (MTTR).
• Prevent time-consuming actions: SOAR drastically reduces false positives, repetitive tasks and manual processes that eat up security analysts’ time.
  
• Access better intelligence: SOAR solutions aggregate and validate data from threat intelligence platforms, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, security information and event management (SIEM) and other technologies, offering your security team greater insight and context.
• Improve reporting and communication: With all security operations activities aggregated in one place and displayed in intuitive dashboards, stakeholders can receive all the information they need, including clear metrics that help them identify how to make improvements to response workflows and reduce response times.
• Boost decision-making ability: Because SOAR solutions may offer features like pre-built playbooks, drag-and-drop functions to build playbooks from scratch and automated alert prioritization, they aim to be user-friendly security systems, even for less experienced security analysts.

What are some SOAR use cases?

One of the smartest things you can do before you begin talking to vendors about SOAR solutions is to think about how your organization will use it. Typical use cases are highly contingent on your industry. Some examples include:

1. Combating cyberattacks with automatic incident response: The types and degrees of security incidents can vary, and some industries are experiencing more pain than others. For example, while phishing attacks are on the rise everywhere, the financial industry in particular was the most targeted industry by phishing attacks during the first quarter of 2022 — accounting for almost 24% of phishing attacks on companies around the world.

   SOAR solutions can automatically detect and examine the sources of those types of attacks. They can also contain threats before confidential data is released to attackers, reducing response times from hours to minutes.

2. Threat hunting: With automation, many of the previously encountered malicious threats are addressed instantly, creating necessary bandwidth for security analysts to correct vulnerabilities and making it harder for hackers to access confidential information.
3. Penetration testing: SOAR platforms can automate activities such as asset discovery scans, classification activities, and target prioritization, making it possible for security teams to operationalize their penetration testing efforts.
4. Improving overall vulnerability management: A SOAR solution can ensure that your security team triages and adequately manages risk introduced by new vulnerabilities discovered within your environment. As a result, they are able to be proactive, while also putting safeguards into place to avoid breaches or other attacks.

A high-level SOAR workflow

Comparing SOAR With SIEM and XDR

How are SOAR and SIEM different?

While most SOAR solutions are deployed alongside security information and event management (SIEM), they aren’t the same thing.

SIEM is a security management system that offers full visibility into activity within your environment, allowing you to identify threats in real time. It collects, parses and categorizes security-relevant data from a wide range of sources, then analyzes that data to provide insights, specifically on unusual behavior, so you can act accordingly.

Like SOAR, SIEM does the work that would be impossible to do manually. Also, like SOAR, SIEM aggregates event data across disparate sources within your network infrastructure, including servers, systems, devices and applications, from perimeter to end user. Unlike a SOAR solution, a SIEM solution serves as your security data repository and provides an efficient means to search, correlate and analyze all data available.

How are SOAR and XDR different?

Although there are similarities between SOAR and extended detection and response (XDR) solutions there are significant differences between them that determine how and when they’re implemented.

XDR products provide a single solution that helps security analysts with endpoint threat detection, investigation and response by streamlining the steps analysts typically perform during triage, validation and response for security threats. XDR and SOAR are similar in that they both integrate diverse security tools and support an automated and coordinated response.

However, SOAR and XDR do differ in a few ways. SOAR focuses more on automation to orchestrate and automate incident response procedures using a playbook-based system. SOAR solutions are designed to integrate with as many tools as possible. In contrast, XDR typically automates single actions based on the analysis of incoming data. XDR solutions are also typically created by assembling a single vendor’s tools and implementing them together.

Getting Started

What are SOAR capabilities to look for?

If you’re ready to see how SOAR can improve your overall security operations, the next step is to look for the right SOAR tool. Here are the capabilities that you should look for:

• Easily digestible reports: That big-picture view allows you to quickly understand what’s going on within the network, investigate issues and decide what to do next.
• Dashboard modification: You’ll want to display data in the format that best suits the needs of your organization.
• Automatic queueing and prioritizing of alerts: Essentially, you want to know what tasks are most important to work on immediately, without having to conduct extensive searching.
• Organized alert details: Data, such as IP addresses, domain names, file hashes, user names, email addresses, and other relevant fields should be organized in a way that security analysts can immediately process.
• Flexible, easy playbook creation and case management: Ideally, you want a solution that lets you build your playbooks without requiring any coding. Look for one that offers both built-in playbooks and options to customize and build your own with the playbook editor of your choice. Additionally, you’ll want the ability to organize and group playbooks based on what works best for your organization.
• Integration with the tools you use to run your business: This includes security and infrastructure assets, such as firewalls, endpoint products, reputation services, sandboxes, directory services and SIEMs.
• Built-in guidance: Some solutions have intelligent assistants integrated into the interface, offering suggestions for investigating, containing, eliminating and even recovering from an incident. This feature is especially valuable for new security analysts.
• Scalability: You will also need the platform to grow in its capabilities along with your organization.

How do you get the most value out of SOAR?

As with all security tools, the real value of SOAR is in how you use it.. Follow these best practices to gain the most value from your SOAR solution investment:

1. Establish priorities: It’s best to first evaluate where automation can be effective, and then prioritize those needs. Consider the big picture, figure out which incidents occur most often, and which take the most time to investigate and resolve. Then define your use cases based on your industry and organizational goals, and create a list of how you will use SOAR. Involve stakeholders across your security operations center (SOC) as you identify use cases, even if you don’t think you will implement them right away.
2. Develop your playbooks: It’s important to document the steps, instructions and best practices for resolving incidents effectively, ensuring that your security team follows a consistent, repeatable process. As you establish a priority list for developing playbooks, start with those that will eliminate repetitive tasks.
3. Inventory your tools, apps and APIs: You need to ensure that the vendor you choose can support all of the tools you’re currently using. Remember that a SOAR solution is only as good as the information you’re feeding it, so consider whether you need to upgrade any other parts of your security infrastructure before deploying it.
4. Train staff: Not only do you need to train staff to effectively use your security automation software, you need to train them to address complex incidents the software can’t resolve. When alerts that need human invention are flagged, your staff must have the expertise and confidence to tackle those issues.
5. Take advantage of newfound time: Plan how your analysts will focus on value-added tasks that benefit the organization — for example, conducting a deep investigation as to why you are constantly fighting off phishing attacks. What’s more, automation will create new roles within the organization — so use the newly available time to train staff to design, implement and improve upon automation logic.
6. Don’t expect magic overnight: Rather than aiming to use every single SOAR capability from the start, it’s probably better to ease into it gently. Start by focusing on critical areas first and build sophistication over time, which will help you realize the full potential of the solution while minimizing growing pains.

The Bottom Line: SOAR can optimize your security operations

You have the opportunity to enable your security team to do the impossible: Keep up with the never-ending security alerts that plague a highly complex IT environment. Freeing your team from dealing with false positives, repetitive alerts and low-risk warnings, SOAR lets you pivot from a reactionary approach to a more proactive one. Rather than fighting fires, security analysts can put their talents and extensive training to better use, ultimately improving your organization’s overall security posture.

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