What Is SOAR?

SOAR stands for Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response. SOAR platforms are a collection of security software solutions and tools for browsing and collecting data from a variety of sources. SOAR solutions then use a combination of human and machine learning to analyze this diverse data to comprehend and prioritize incident response actions.

The term is used to describe three software capabilities – threat and vulnerability management, security incident response and security operations automation. SOAR allows companies to collect threat-related data from a range of sources and automate the responses to the threat. The term was originally coined by Gartner, who also defined the three capabilities. Threat and vulnerability management (Orchestration) covers technologies that help amend cyber threats, while security operations automation (Automation) relates to the technologies that enable automation and orchestration within operations.

What security operations teams are looking for today:

  • Automate Repeated Response Workflow​
  • Save Time for Higher Priority Triage Tasks​
  • Easy Standardized Response to follow

Benefits of SOAR

Many security operations teams are struggling with connecting the noise from disparate systems​, resulting in too many error-prone manual processes, and lacking the highly skilled talent to solve for all of this. The result of this current way of addressing problems is the increased probability of missing an alert that matters, wasting time and resources due to manual processes, and slow response times due to lack of standardized response​​ capabilities. All resulting in minimizing the impact of security incidents of all types​, maximizing value of existing security investments​, and an overall reduced risk of legal liability and business downtime​ To achieve this:

  • Consolidate process management, technology and expertise​
  • Centralize asset monitoring​
  • Enrich alerts with contextual intelligence ​
  • Automate response and perform inline blocking 

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