Security Orchestration Automation and Response

Table of Contents

What is SOAR: Security Automation vs. Security Orchestration

The Benefits of SOAR

Finding a SOAR Platform

SOAR Capabilities that Create Compelling Value

Cyware’s SOAR Solution

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What is SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response)?

Security Orchestration Automation and Response
Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response, or SOAR is a technology that promises to streamline and automate security operations. It has become an indispensable tool for modern security operations centers (SOC). 

SOAR can address a variety of security-related challenges including:
  • Inefficient Incident Response: Manual incident response processes can be slow, allowing attackers to remain undetected and cause more damage.
  • Alert Overload: With the increasing volume of security alerts generated by various security tools, it becomes challenging for security teams to manage and respond to all alerts effectively. 
  • Complexity of Security Tools: Organizations leverage a multitude of security tools. Each tool generates alerts and data in different formats, making it challenging to manage and correlate them. 
  • Lack of Visibility: Consuming alerts and aligning log data from all connected and potentially impacted assets presents a significant challenge.

These challenges impact an organization’s threat handling and response effectiveness and increase the likelihood and impact of cyberattacks. SOAR is designed to address these challenges by automating and streamlining security operations, improving incident response times, informing investigations, extending visibility, and enhancing overall security efficacy.

SOAR tools allow an organization to define incident analysis and response procedures in a digital workflow format.” Gartner defines SOAR as solutions that combine incident response, orchestration and automation, and threat intelligence platform management capabilities in a single platform. According to Gartner’s 2023 Market Guide for Security Orchestration, Automation and Response Solutions, modern-day enterprises leverage SOAR tools to document and implement security processes, support security incident management, provide machine-based assistance to security teams, and better operationalize threat intelligence.


What is SOAR: Security Automation vs. Security Orchestration

It’s important for a security team to understand SOAR workflows for orchestrating and automating their security operation. Often the terms security orchestration and automation are used interchangeably in the cybersecurity landscape. 

However, it’s imperative to understand that both terms have different meanings and objectives. When automation emerged, it became a significant asset for security teams that were tired of mundane, time-consuming, and low-level tasks. Following this, orchestration came into the picture, enhancing time and resource management for security teams, helping them respond faster to incidents, and prioritizing important tasks.

Security automation is the automatic handling of tasks in cybersecurity systems without the need for human intervention. 

On the contrary, security orchestration refers to employing numerous automation tasks across different platforms. Automation tasks are part of the overall orchestration process, which includes more complex schemes and tasks. In a nutshell, orchestration is nothing but the automated coordination and management of different systems, services, and middleware. Security orchestration utilizes several automated as well as semi-automated actions to implement a complex process, which can comprise multiple automated tasks or systems. 

It focuses on streamlining and optimizing repetitive processes and ensures the accurate execution of tasks. Whenever a process becomes monotonous and can be automated, orchestration is used to optimize the process and eradicate redundancies.

Automation and orchestration can be best comprehended by distinguishing between a single function and a complete process. While automation just handles one task, orchestration uses a complex set of tasks as well as processes. Automation allows security teams to perform time-consuming tasks smoothly without any human intervention, enabling them to take a more proactive approach toward potential threats. The aim of orchestration is to optimize a process.

The Benefits of SOAR

At its core, SOAR is about automation and integration. By connecting disparate security tools and systems, SOAR streamlines workflows, reduces manual tasks, and enables security analysts to focus on activities that require human reasoning and intelligence. By automating repetitive and high-confidence tasks, overall response times can be improved, security staff can work more efficiently, and ultimately enhance an organization’s overall security posture.

SOAR is designed to be a game-changing technology that transforms the way organizations investigate and respond to security incidents, enhancing the speed and effectiveness of reactive security. 

  • Faster Incident Response: With SOAR technology, organizations can quickly automate many tasks involved in investigating and responding to threats. For example, SOAR can automatically quarantine infected devices, block malicious IPs, or initiate patches or updates for vulnerable software.

  • Better Efficiency: By automating some security tasks, a SOAR solution frees up security teams to focus on critical tasks that require human expertise, improving overall efficiency and productivity.

  • Expanded Scalability: SOAR significantly enhances scalability by automating and orchestrating security workflows, enabling organizations to seamlessly handle growing volumes of security events and incidents while optimizing resource allocation, thereby providing a path to more efficient and effective security operations at any scale.

  • Advanced Metrics and Governance: With the valuable analytics and metrics provided by SOAR, organizations can improve their security processes over time. This enables them to track performance, identify areas for improvement, and demonstrate regulatory compliance.

  • Improved ROI: Automating security tasks with SOAR can yield more effective resource utilization and unlock time constraints typically found in SOC operations that are frequently overwhelmed with alert volumes.

Organizations need to carefully weigh the gains available through SOAR against the costs, both upfront and ongoing, of implementing SOAR since it includes many value propositions, but these do not come for free. To ensure a satisfactory ROI, organizations should thoroughly assess the costs, benefits, and potential challenges associated with implementing and administering a SOAR solution. Conducting a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis, evaluating the specific needs of the organization, and selecting a solution that aligns with those needs can help maximize the ROI and ensure the successful adoption of SOAR technology.


Finding a SOAR Platform

Investing in SOAR can help you protect your organization from cyber threats and minimize the impact of security incidents. With its advanced automation and orchestration capabilities, SOAR can help you respond to security incidents faster and more effectively. Moreover, it can reduce the workload on security teams, enabling them to focus on more critical tasks and improving their overall efficiency. 


Baseline SOAR Capabilities

While there isn't a universally defined set of baseline capabilities for SOAR, there are several fundamental functionalities that are included in a robust SOAR platform. These include:

  • Orchestration and Automation: While orchestration enables streamlined incident response, automation reduces the manual efforts required to respond to incidents, allowing security teams to focus on more complex and critical tasks. Orchestration allows organizations to enhance security processes by allowing their existing resources to work together. SOAR security platforms empower security teams to be more proactive in preventing their organization from threats by executing robust defense strategies with comprehensive data collection and a workflow analysis.

  • Case Management: SOAR solutions provide a centralized platform for managing security cases, ensuring consistent and organized incident handling throughout the investigation and resolution process.

  • Automated Incident Management: With the ability to receive and manage security alerts or incidents from various sources, such as security devices, threat intelligence feeds, or user reports, SOAR platforms help aggregate, correlate, and prioritize incidents for further investigation and response.

  • Vulnerability Management: With SOAR, organizations can automate some of the vulnerability management lifecycle. It can integrate with scanning tools to initiate automated scans, collect and assess results, and orchestrate remediation workflows, enabling security teams to prioritize and address vulnerabilities more efficiently.

  • Threat Hunting: SOAR empowers security teams to proactively hunt for threats by collecting and analyzing data from diverse sources. It automates the initial triage of potential threats and orchestrates incident response workflows, enabling organizations to detect and respond to threats faster.

  • Playbooks and Workflows: Organizations can create and manage customized playbooks or workflows using SOAR platforms, tailoring them to their specific requirements. These playbooks can incorporate automated actions, manual tasks, and decision points, allowing for the effective handling of various types of security incidents.

  • Reporting and Metrics: SOAR platforms often provide reporting capabilities to track and analyze security operations. They generate metrics and visualizations that help security teams understand their performance, measure the efficacy of their response processes, and identify areas for improvement.

  • Improved Threat Intelligence: Organizations can optimize their threat intelligence workflow by consolidating their existing security tools into one SOAR platform. A SOAR solution can identify and address issues in real-time, allowing security teams to respond faster to every kind of threat and prevent potential breaches.

  • Faster Response Time: Security orchestration enables the collection of multiple alerts from various systems into one incident. Saving time, security automation and orchestration allows a SOAR platform to respond to alerts without any human intervention. A SOAR platform provides context to textual information and automation to decision-making, facilitating a faster alert handling process.

  • Improved SOCs with Standardized Processes: By using a security orchestration, automation, and response platform, organizations can have improved SOCs, and security teams can better prioritize and optimize alert remediation. Security automation and orchestration reduces the burden of performing mundane and repetitive tasks done by SOC analysts on a routine basis. A state-of-the-art SOAR platform consolidates these tasks in playbooks that draft the end-to-end incident response procedure.

  • Proactive Resolution of Security Alerts: When alarms and relevant data are examined at machine speed, security teams have the bandwidth to proactively collect evidence and suitable security event context, allowing improved investigation, quicker decision-making, and better breach prevention.

  • Lowered Costs: Organizations can have significant cost savings on reporting, alert handling, analyst training, and playbook creation by integrating a SOAR platform into their business model.

  • Consistency and Compliance: As the automated responses are generated by sets of rules, events of a given type are handled identically thus, a SOAR solution offers the benefit of consistency. The automation features of a SOAR solution eliminate human error and lower the number of judgment calls that security teams need to make. Moreover, consistency can be helpful from a compliance standpoint. A proper SOAR implementation allows security teams to automate many actions that are required to ensure regulatory compliance.

It’s important to note that SOAR capabilities can vary across different vendors and implementations. Organizations should evaluate their specific needs and requirements when selecting a SOAR solution to ensure it aligns with the objectives of their security operations center (SOC).


SOAR Capabilities that Create Compelling Value

By investing in an advanced SOAR solution, organizations can improve their ability to detect and respond to threats, while also reducing the risk of human error and improving overall efficiency. What sets an advanced SOAR platform apart from legacy ones are the capabilities that create compelling value. 

  • Threat Intelligence Aggregation: SOAR can collect, analyze, and utilize threat intelligence to identify potential threats and proactively prevent security breaches. Integration with threat intelligence sources allows SOAR platforms to enrich security incidents with contextual information. This integration helps in making more informed decisions during incident response, such as identifying the severity of an incident, assessing the potential impact, and understanding adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).

  • Integrated Capability: Organizations should invest in SOAR solutions that address the need for comprehensive threat response. Also, important and unique to Cyware is the ability to leverage orchestration for both proactive and reactive response. This set of capabilities encompasses a Cyber Fusion solution that can include a threat intelligence platform (TIP) and decouples security orchestration and automation (SOA) from case management (Response). These capabilities are designed to operate independently but operate more effectively when deployed cohesively, via native integrations. A Cyber Fusion solution orchestrates actions based on threat intel insights and correlation of comprehensive visibility. 

  • Seamless Integration with Existing Tools: While selecting a suitable SOAR solution, it is advisable for security teams to prioritize solutions that can seamlessly integrate with existing tools. The ideal SOAR solution supports a wide range of security tools across multiple point solutions, including security information and event management (SIEM), firewalls, endpoint solutions, intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS), security service edge (SSE), secure email gateways, and vulnerability assessment technologies. The key premise is to do more with the tools you already have by operating more expeditiously, efficiently, and completely.

  • No-Code/Low-Code Security Automation: Low-code and no-code automation tools have proven to be effective in addressing the urgent requirement to digitize workflows and enhance the overall efficiency and productivity of security teams. Investing in such a SOAR solution empowers organizations to take ownership of their automation capabilities and develop new integration applications requiring minimal or no coding at all. Based on your security needs, you can choose either a low-code SOAR platform that involves minimal coding or configuration, or a no-code SOAR platform offering the advantage of codeless automation.

What is a Low-code SOAR Platform?

SOAR security vendors have started modifying their SOAR platforms in a low-code environment. So, what is a low-code SOAR platform? Low-code SOAR platforms are the ones that enable users with limited programming knowledge or technical experience to create or enhance software applications and build automated workflows on visual, drag-and-drop editors. Low-code SOAR platforms come with pre-built modules, functionalities, and rules for common use cases and repeatable actions that can be quickly combined to create complete services, workflows, and apps. These can be enhanced with customized, hand-coded features by more skilled developers at a later stage, if necessary.

While low-code SOAR is gaining momentum in the cybersecurity landscape, some enterprises have also started leveraging no-code security automation. No-code SOAR or lightweight security automation platforms eliminate the trouble of writing codes and take a codeless approach to security automation. Let’s find out the difference between low-code SOAR and no-code SOAR platforms.

Low-Code SOAR vs. No-Code SOAR

To begin with, both low-code SOAR and no-code SOAR platforms differ in terms of their capability to integrate. While low-code SOAR platforms come with larger prebuilt integration libraries and also allow security teams to build their own integrations with Python editor modules, no-code SOAR platforms are preconfigured with libraries of integrations that require the users to leverage REST APIs for building their own integrations.

When it comes to playbook customization, low-code SOAR allows customization of playbooks for a wide range of unique use cases, whereas no-code SOAR restricts customization as it offers inbuilt templates that support specific actions.

How similar or different low-code SOAR and no-code SOAR are to each other can be clearly said when more and more organizations start to embark on their low-code or no-code security automation journey.

  • Deployment Flexibility: When selecting a SOAR solution, security and risk management leaders should give preference to solutions that offer a range of deployment options, including cloud, on-premises, or hybrid. This will allow for accommodating the organization's security initiatives, data privacy considerations, and/or cloud-first initiatives.

  • Dashboards and Reporting for SOC Management: It’s critical that everyone, from the manager to the analyst to the CISO, is informed about the status and historical context of incident response processes and performance results. To facilitate this, SOAR platforms that come with dashboards and reporting are essential for providing a comprehensive understanding of SecOps processes. These tools enable the aggregation of security telemetry and threat visibility, which allows for a broad overview of security controls and activities. Statistical charts, reports, and graphs are presented to highlight the overall involvement of an organization in incident response.


Cyware’s SOAR Solution

Cyware is an expert in the world of preventing cyber threats. We provide an advanced SOAR solution by combining three separate but integrated modules:

A full-incident analysis and response platform, designed to facilitate collaboration between disparate security teams against malware, vulnerabilities, and threat actors affecting digital and human assets in real-time.

When facing potential threats from around the internet, you need an advanced SOAR solution to fit into your security process. Trust Cyware for all your cybersecurity threat-hunting and prevention needs.

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