14 Major Benefits of SOAR

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Top Benefits of SOAR

Cyware's Orchestrate: The Best SOAR Platform

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14 Major Benefits of SOAR

  • Security Orchestration Automation and Response

Posted on: August 04, 2022

14 Major Benefits of SOAR
Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) technology unlocks the full value of security operations by reducing the time, burden, and resources needed to execute swift, and effective action at every stage of the detection, analysis, and cyber threat response. By leveraging the best SOAR tool, security teams can orchestrate and automate a majority of repetitive and mundane tasks to streamline threat detection and response processes.

However, your security team doesn’t need a one-size-fits-all SOAR solution. Response strategies also differ due to the differences in security culture, technologies, and processes across organizations. Although these processes are built on similar foundations with the goal to streamline cybersecurity operations, enterprises lack the approach to connect them all and drive a common centralized and automated SecOps workflow. SOAR solves this challenge by connecting together tools, systems, people, and processes across environments. A modern-day SOAR platform must be vendor-agnostic and be able to support low code and no code security automation, and technologies for orchestrating workflows and automating incident response without requiring investment into advanced programming skills. 

A vendor-agnostic SOAR platform offers enterprises the capability to seamlessly integrate different security tools and technologies available in the market, thereby enabling the SecOps team to gain a holistic view of the cybersecurity environment. With this approach, organizations can build automated workflows to spot cybersecurity risks and react to complex security incidents at machine speed. Nowadays, organizations have started adopting no code security automation and low code security automation platforms to automate security operations. While no code SOAR tools allow security teams to automate their workflows without writing a single line of code, low code SOAR tools allow custom coding to create or enhance software applications and build automated workflows while eliminating the need for advanced programming skills. 

Top Benefits of SOAR

Regardless of the tools and technologies integrated, the ultimate goal of the SOAR platform is to enhance the productivity of SOC processes and improve threat detection and incident response. Some of the major benefits of SOAR include:

  1. Improved Efficiency of Security Operations: Amidst the ever-evolving cyber threats, a shortage of qualified security personnel, and the need to manage a wide range of tools and technologies, SOAR helps businesses of all sizes to improve their ability to swiftly detect and respond to attacks. It relieves security teams of mundane and repetitive tasks of managing disparate security technologies and monitoring daily alarms that are generated from them. A good SOAR platform incorporates these tasks into playbooks that lay out the end-to-end automated incident response steps. While security orchestration helps collect data from disparate sources, security automation assists in the execution of responses and actions to alerts and incidents by using automated playbooks. This ensures that security operations and processes are handled more efficiently and organizations can bolster their productivity and capacity to address more incidents without relying on security personnel.? 
  2. Improved Threat Detection: SOAR offers better threat detection capability by feeding high-fidelity threat intelligence into detection tools like Security information and event management (SIEM), Endpoint Detection Response (EDR), Network Detection Response (NDR), etc. Security teams can also boost their investigation process with better context and insights into a threat as SOAR also enables correlation and enrichment of logs generated by detection tools.    
  3. Accelerated Incident Response Process: In this era where cyber threats are occurring at an alarming rate, time to respond to an incident is a critical aspect. The better and faster the process of threat detection, the less time it takes to respond to an incident. SOAR expedites incident response processes with automated playbooks enabling security teams to focus on other important tasks that need human analysis and decision-making. Moreover, SOAR solutions use varied playbooks to automate responses to different kinds of threats without any manual intervention, which means security teams can automatically take actions for threat detection, investigation, enrichment, containment, response, and dissemination to security tools such as SIEMs, firewalls, threat intelligence platforms (TIPs), incident response platforms and others. 
  4. Reduced MTTD and MTTR: SOAR helps organizations to reduce both Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) by validating and remediating security alerts within minutes. With security automation, MTTD is reduced by providing contextualized data on every incident, facilitating security teams to spend less time collecting information and focus more on the alert investigation. On the other hand, MTTR is achieved by automatically responding to alerts and incidents in real-time. 
  5. High-Quality Threat Intelligence Delivery: Tackling sophisticated cyber threats need an in-depth understanding of attackers’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and other key indicators. SOAR helps SOCs to become more intelligence-driven by gathering and validating data from a wide range of sources, including threat intelligence platforms, and security technologies such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, SIEM, and UEBA. With accurate context, better analysis, and up-to-date threat information, security teams can make suitable and informed decisions needed for accelerating the response action. Furthermore, security analysts can use the orchestrated contextual data to conduct deeper and broader investigations. 
  6. Productivity Boost of Security Teams: SOAR empowers security teams to be more proactive in preventing attacks against their organizations by integrating a wide range of tools for cloud security, forensics, malware analysis, vulnerability and risk management, data enrichment, threat intelligence, incident response, and endpoint security. This stops security teams from juggling between different consoles and tools while providing a comprehensive view of the entire incident on a single dashboard. With security orchestration and automation, security teams are free of several mundane responsibilities, which in turn gives them more time to prioritize other tasks effectively.
  7. Simplified Threat Response Workflows: By leveraging SOAR tools, security teams can handle multiple incidents/threats from a single dashboard. They can ingest threat intelligence, streamline workflow automation, and manage complex threat campaigns with the help of customizable SOAR playbooks. These playbooks can establish steady customizable workflows to automate responses against sophisticated cyberattacks. Moreover, security teams can use SOAR tools to create their own dashboards and reports to track critical metrics and trends relevant to threats, incidents, assets, and other related attributes.   
  8. Centralized Threat View: The effectiveness of the SOAR platform is measured by the ability to improve and simplify Security Operation Center (SOC) processes. While security teams can leverage the capabilities of SOAR to orchestrate threat intelligence ingestion from external and internal sources, they can augment other security operations using Cyber Fusion Center. The SOAR features of a Cyber Fusion Center enable a centralized threat view as all data is collated, correlated, enriched, and analyzed at a single point. As security teams can manage diverse incidents and threats on a single platform, this reduces false alarms, noise, and overall dwell time of an attack.  
  9. Faster and Easier Security Automation: Modern-day security strategies demand faster and hassle-free security-centric automation across all processes to evaluate emerging threats. Low and no code capabilities of SOAR fulfill these needs as they are easy to deploy across various environments—on-premises and cloud. As these capabilities do not involve writing heavy or complex codes, organizations can easily deploy tools using the drag-and-drop approach, whilst not having to bother about lack of security resources. 
  10. Enhanced Collaboration and Communication: A robust SOAR solution powered by cyber fusion technology improves information sharing across disparate security teams, enhancing communication and collaboration. This seamless collaboration between internal security teams such as SOC, threat hunting, vulnerability management, threat intelligence, and other teams helps deliver an effective cyber incident response. SOAR also offers additional parties, including CISO, CSO, CIO, SOC managers, etc. to improve threat visibility and efficiently coordinate processes. 
  11. Reduced Alert Fatigue: SOC teams are constantly bombarded with heaps of data. The use of advanced SOAR platforms can help them sort through the piles of data while reducing the chances of false positives. When threat alerts are being evaluated at machine speeds, analysts have the bandwidth to gather evidence and relevant security event context proactively, allowing for improved investigation.
  12. Better Security Decision-Making Ability: With the ability to connect the dots between incidents, vulnerabilities, malware, assets, and threat actors, a SOAR platform improves security teams' decision-making ability by offering contextual intelligence on intricate threat campaigns and potential attacker trajectories. Moreover, an advanced SOAR platform comes with the feature of a threat actor tracking engine which allows you to identify and track threat actor footprints by mapping their TTPs against reported incidents using MITRE’s ATT&CK Navigator.
  13. Reduced Vendor Fatigue: Vendor-agnostic SOAR platforms equip organizations with the choice of integrating any tool and technology without any hassle. This eliminates interoperability issues and vendor fatigue as organizations do not have to rely on vendor-specific SOAR platforms that integrate with their security tools and technologies. 
  14. Lowered Operational Cost: Organizations often maintain several security teams, a plethora of technology solutions, and complex manual processes to address security threats. This approach can lead to responses that are slow, weak, and costly. With the SOAR platform, organizations can reduce the manual burden and operational cost as it enables the centralized integration of a variety of tools required for reporting, playbook creation, alert handling, analyst training, and several other aspects.

Cyware's Orchestrate: The Best SOAR Platform

Orchestrate is a vendor-agnostic orchestration platform that offers both no code and low code security automation capabilities to establish automated workflows across cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments. Unlike legacy or vendor-specific SOAR, Orchestrate provides the flexibility to decouple any-to-any orchestration platform, whilst enabling SecOps teams to integrate and automate security workflows using 300+ apps. The uniqueness of this solution lies in the ability to build custom apps through these 300+ apps to provide more specialized features. It also includes a whole set of ready-made playbooks for common use cases and features a Playbook Canvas for easy drag-and-drop custom playbook creation. These benefits are augmented through Cyber Fusion Center which combines all security functions under one roof and provides a single pane of glass to analysts for advanced threat investigation, automated playbook triggering, better collaboration, and faster threat response.  

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