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Table of Contents
What is the difference between Security Automation and Security Orchestration?
What is a SOAR Platform?
What is a Low-code SOAR Platform?
Low-Code SOAR vs. No-Code SOAR
How Can SOAR Tools Improve Incident Response?
Benefits of SOAR
Cyware’s SOAR Solution
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What is Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR)?
SOAR stands for Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response. But what is SOAR? Gartner defines Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) as “technologies that enable organizations to collect inputs monitored by the security operations team SOAR tools allow an organization to define incident analysis and response procedures in a digital workflow format.” In other words, SOAR refers to a security technology that allows automated accumulation and flow of security threat data between disparate security technologies (such as SIEM, threat intelligence platform, firewall, incident response platform, etc.) deployed on different environments (cloud and on-premise) and facilitates automated responses to security threats. The objective of SOAR is to streamline security operations.
Initially, in 2015, Gartner identified Threat and Vulnerability Management, Security Incident Response, and Security Operations Automation as three key capabilities of SOAR technology. In 2017, Gartner revised its definition of SOAR technology to include Security Orchestration and Automation, Security Incident Response, and Threat Intelligence Platforms as three constituent components.
Now, in 2022, Gartner has further updated its SOAR security definition and defines it as solutions that combine incident response, orchestration and automation, and threat intelligence platform management capabilities in a single platform. According to Gartner’s 2022 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 the difference between Security Automation and Security Orchestration?
Understanding SOAR workflows should always remain a priority for security teams looking to orchestrate and automate their security processes. 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.
What is a SOAR Platform?
SOAR security orchestration automation response platforms bring together tools, systems, people, and processes in one place to enable security teams to automate security workflows. In other words, SOAR solutions enable organizations to identify the issues, describe the solutions, and automate the response. Often, organizations adopt a SOAR system to improve efficiency, building a security posture that’s more self-operating.
A complete SOAR solution will consist of three integrated functions: security incident response platform (SIRP), and a threat intelligence platform (TIP). Many security workflows and use cases can benefit from elements of each of the three functions so it is crucial for a SOAR solution to have the capabilities to orchestrate across all of them.
Security Orchestration and Automation (SOA) - provides capabilities to automate and orchestrate workflows across multiple tools, systems, and applications
Security Incident Response Platform (SIRP) - provides capabilities for incident and case management including triage and response.
Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) - provides capabilities to gain insights into attackers’ known indicators of compromise (IOC) and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) by ingesting, analyzing, and disseminating threat data and intelligence.
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 the 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.
How Can SOAR Tools Improve Incident Response?
The numerous threats companies face on a daily basis are draining the resources of their security operations centers (SOCs) and slowing their response time to incidents. Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) cyber security platforms can help organizations relieve their SOC analysts from mitigation and low-priority tasks, enabling them to focus on boosting their SOC’s overall effectiveness in incident response.
Being flexible and adaptable, SOAR products security can seamlessly integrate into a broader network and fit into the security environment of any organization. They can support a wide range of products and capabilities, enhancing an organization’s efficiency and cybersecurity without disruption.
Benefits of SOAR
Since the conception of this technology, large enterprises, security vendors, and managed security service providers (MSSPs) have developed a wide range of SOAR use cases, seeking their benefits as the market continues to thrive. Some of the benefits that a SOAR solution offers are:
Advanced Orchestration with Automation
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.
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.
Automated Metrics and Reporting
By using a robust SOAR solution, security teams can generate standardized incident reports, saving them valuable time in gathering and sifting through manual metrics and reports. Additionally, they can maintain real-time reports and gain clear visibility into their organizations’ state of security with precise progress bars and other critical metrics.
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.
Cyware’s SOAR Solution
Cyware provides an advanced SOAR solution by combining three separate but integrated modules:
An any-to-any vendor-agnostic orchestration platform for connecting and automating cyber, IT, and DevOps workflows across the cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments.
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.
An innovative threat intelligence platform (TIP) to automatically aggregate, enrich, and analyze threat indicators in a collaborative ecosystem.
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