What is SOAR and How Does It Improve the Effectiveness of a SOC Team?

Table of Contents:

1. What is SOAR?
2. What Is the Purpose of SOAR?
3. Why Organizations Need SOAR
4. Benefits of SOAR
5. What is the difference between SOAR and SIEM? 
6. Final Thoughts: How Does SOAR Improve the Effectiveness of a SOC Team?

What is SOAR?

SOAR, which stands for Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response, allows organizations to collect large amounts of data and alerts from a wide variety of sources. SOAR technologies help build automated processes to respond to low-level security events. SOAR technology helps execute, coordinate, and automate tasks between people and tools, allowing organizations to respond quickly to cyberattacks and to improve their overall cybersecurity posture. 

SOAR tools focus on three key areas within security operations: 

1. Threat and vulnerability management
2. Security operations automation
3. Incident response

What Is the Purpose of SOAR? 

Working in security operations can be frustrating at times because of the overwhelming amount of alerts that come in. Analysts may not be able to get through all the alerts because it takes time to go through each one to determine if it is a genuine threat or a false positive and to provide the remediation steps.

Many SOC teams currently struggle with manual processes and do not have enough skilled people to solve the alerts. The current way the SOC team operates increases the chance of analysts missing important alerts and wastes time and resources spent on manual work.

The purpose of SOAR is to prioritize the overwhelming amount of alerts to improve efficiency by providing a standardized process for data aggregation.

This would help human and machine-level analysis by automating the detection and response process. Implementing SOAR is beneficial because it gives analysts more time to focus on the alerts that require more attention and deeper analysis. Many organizations are utilizing SOAR to help improve the effectiveness of their SOC team and overall cybersecurity posture.

Why Organizations Need SOAR

Organizations today face many challenges, including a few listed below, and SOAR can help with some of these issues.

• A growing amount of complex security threats 
• A lot of security tools that do not communicate with each other
• An overwhelming amount of alerts that the analysts need to go through, prioritize, investigate, and resolve
• The inability to find enough highly skilled people to perform the job

Benefits of SOAR

Here are some of the benefits of SOAR:

Improves Efficiency of Operations

SOAR technologies can help automate some of the daily tasks performed by analysts within the SOC team. They save time by making sure that processes are handled efficiently to improve the organization’s productivity to address more incidents. Remember, the key is to work smarter, not harder. 

Delivers Better Quality Intelligence

SOAR helps SOC teams become more intelligent-driven by aggregating data from a variety of sources, including SIEM, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems. This will help analysts immensely to make better decisions regarding an incident.

Enhance and Improve Incident Response

Quick response is extremely important when investigating an incident to minimize the spread of the threat and disruption it can cause within an organization. SOAR aids in reducing the meantime to detect and mean time to respond by detecting and remediating alerts in minutes. Therefore consolidating all of your security tools into one platform that automatically identifies and resolves issues in real-time will help the SOC team react quicker and more intelligently to stop any potential breaches from spreading.

Improve SOC Management with Standardized Processes

Using a centralized management system within a SOC team will better maintain regulatory and internal compliance.  

What is the difference between SOAR and SIEM? 

SOAR and SIEM both want to resolve the same issue — a large amount of security information and events within an organization. 

SOAR platforms include case management, standardization, workflow and analysis, and data collection, while SIEMs analyze log data from different sources for any security issues and alert analysts. 

SOAR and SIEM can work together by having SIEM detect suspicious activities, therefore triggering alerts, while the SOAR solution responds to these alerts by triaging and taking the necessary remediation steps. SOAR solutions take SIEM’s response capabilities to a whole other level by automating responses.

SOAR can add value to a SIEM solution if the SIEM integrates SOAR functionalities to its solution.

Final Thoughts: How Does SOAR Improve the Effectiveness of a SOC Team?

Organizations today face many challenges, and as we can see, implementing SOAR would be very beneficial to the SOC team for many reasons. The overall goal of SOAR is to improve the SOC process and the productivity of the analysts in an efficient manner. SOAR platforms put everything in one centralized place to not waste any time or resources. Keep in mind that just because you implement SOAR does not mean that the problem is solved. SOAR is an additional technology added to help improve the effectiveness of a SOC team. It will still need to be monitored and tweaked occasionally by security personnel.