What is SOAR? Learn more about how SOAR can help your IT team and the difference between SOAR vs. SIEM in our guide to automating security with SOAR.
With security threats like phishing attacks and ransomware on the rise, your cybersecurity strategy plays a critical role in the success of your organization. Security tools like SOAR can optimize your security operations and build automated response procedures for low-risk security events. So what is SOAR, and how does it work
What Is SOAR?
SOAR stands for “security orchestration, automation, and response.” SOAR technology can automate your cybersecurity program, quickly mitigating threats and improving your overall security. With SOAR tools, you can collect, aggregate, and analyze vast amounts of data from multiple sources to build a comprehensive view of your cybersecurity landscape.
SOAR provides a top-to-bottom threat management system by combining three software capabilities:
- Threat and vulnerability management
- Incident response workflow
- Security operations automation
Because speed and efficiency are vital to a successful threat response strategy, working in security operations can be challenging. Many security analysts are quickly overwhelmed with the sheer volume of alerts spread across multiple channels.
In addition to gathering and analyzing enough data to determine which threats are legitimate, IT security professionals must also coordinate appropriate responses to mitigate those threats.
SOAR vs. SIEM: What’s the Difference?
SIEM is short for “security information and event management.” It’s a collection of software tools security teams use to gather and analyze data to gain company-wide visibility of security events.
A SIEM solution lets your IT team collect and consolidate information into a centralized database. It then configures rules that organize security events to determine the most urgent problems.
Although SOAR and SIEM gather and analyze data to detect security threats, they are significantly different. While SIEM tools can only notify security teams about suspicious activity, SOAR solutions are more advanced. Thanks to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), SOAR can learn behavior patterns and predict similar events to create automated incident response procedures.
SOAR and SIEM both aggregate data, but SOAR takes this further by collecting data from a broader range of data sources.
SIEM collects data internally from your IT infrastructure, while SOAR also retrieves data from external sources and endpoint security software. As a result, SOAR provides a more comprehensive security solution for your organization by gathering information from external sources.
How Does SOAR Work?
The individual components of SOAR work in conjunction to create a cohesive security workflow for your organization’s IT team, reducing incident response times.
Orchestration enables your IT team to create a more unified security environment. A centralized console manages and coordinates all aspects of your business’s security program. By collecting both internal and external threat data, your IT team can assess each security situation and determine an appropriate response.
Automation eliminates the time-consuming process of manually assessing and responding to every security threat. Instead, SOAR can automatically complete many tasks, including overseeing user access and query logs, typically requiring multiple security tools.
Response refers to how an organization manages, plans, and coordinates its reaction to a security threat. Because SOAR’s automation feature reduces the risk of human error, threat responses are faster and more accurate, resulting in speedier security issue resolution.
Benefits of SOAR
SOAR platforms can help organizations improve their cybersecurity strategy by providing the following benefits.
Increased Security Intelligence
Cybersecurity threats are becoming more sophisticated every day. SOAR aggregates data from multiple sources, including threat intelligence platforms and intrusion detection systems, so you can gain complete visibility of your cybersecurity topography.
With SOAR, security teams become more data-driven, make more informed decisions, and implement faster incident detection and response.
Improved Operations
Overseeing a sprawling set of security tools, platforms, and technologies requires constant monitoring to ensure their integrity and assess their performance. Unfortunately, this process costs time and effort, requiring human intervention while also increasing the risk of errors.
In addition, multiple systems can generate thousands of alarms each day, possibly leading to alert fatigue in your security team.
However, SOAR can help automate repetitive manual tasks for your security operations team. By combining the power of AI and machine learning, SOAR enables your IT team to approach security responses more efficiently while improving productivity.
Enhanced Incident Response Procedures
Rapid security response is essential to minimize the risk of security threats before they impact your organization. SOAR analyzes and assesses security threats within minutes rather than days or even weeks. By catching security threats as early as possible, you can avoid costly damage and disruption to your operations.
Security teams can also use SOAR to create automated incident response procedures known as playbooks. Playbooks assign severity levels to security alerts and implement standardized response processes across your organization to maintain a consistent, transparent cybersecurity strategy.
Improved Reporting
SOAR aggregates data and generates reports in a customizable platform so IT teams can streamline their processes while improving communication across your entire organization.
However, SOAR aggregates data and generates reports in a customizable platform so IT teams can streamline their processes while improving communication across your entire organization.
Time and Cost Savings
SOAR frees up your security team to focus on severe threats by automating repetitive tasks, saving your business both time and money. In addition, SOAR can dramatically improve the efficiency of your security operations while retaining your security personnel.
Reduced Alert Fatigue
Whether it’s legitimate or not, a security alert has to be addressed by analysts. Still, thousands of notifications inevitably lead to alert fatigue. Because SOAR can automate many security tasks, it creates a more balanced workflow for your team.
Look to Armorblox for MSOAR: The Latest in Email Security Technology
As more organizations recognize the importance of investing in their cybersecurity programs, advanced technology like SOAR can drastically improve your security posture and decrease reliance on manual tasks. Many businesses are turning specifically to MSOAR — email security orchestration, automation and response.
MSOAR eliminates most and, in some cases, all of your manual remediation tasks by automating every event and supporting steps.
MSOAR:
- Ingests and parses emails through an API
- Performs threat intelligence lookups
- Handles the response and remediation at speeds well beyond human capability
These steps are also guaranteed to be performed by the policies you configure and set. In addition, MSOAR platforms never miss a step or accidentally make a mistake, so accuracy exceeds human capability.
Most importantly, MSOAR handles the tedious, monotonous, repetitive tasks that quickly burn out and overwhelm analysts. This means analysts are freed up to contribute value to more important human functions like research, threat hunting and expert evaluation of questionable events.
At Armorblox, we’ve leveraged the latest natural language processing and deep learning developments to create the world’s first natural language understanding platform with MSOAR capabilities for email security.
Armorblox analyzes identity, behavior, and language across your email and communication platforms to stop today’s most significant cybersecurity attacks.
To learn more about how Armorblox protects businesses from today’s security threats, take a 5-minute product tour below.
