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SOAR

What Is SOAR?

Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) technology enables the coordination, execution, and automation of operations amongst several individuals and technologies on a single platform. This enables firms to not only respond rapidly to cybersecurity threats, but also to watch, understand, and avoid future instances, thereby enhancing their entire security posture.

A comprehensive SOAR product, as defined by Gartner, is designed to operate under three primary software capabilities: threat and vulnerability management, security incident response, and security operations automation.

What is a SOAR Playbook?

SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response) solutions assist teams in improving their security posture and increasing productivity while not forgetting important security and IT procedures. This is accomplished through the use of playbooks, a built-in feature of SOAR systems that carry out various activities and processes depending on rules, triggers, and events.

By automating activities, synchronizing alerts from numerous security devices, and offering incident response playbooks, integrating SOAR into an organization's security operations center (SOC) may improve overall security efficiency and effectiveness. SOAR systems use a variety of playbooks to automate reactions to various types of threats without the need for manual involvement. These playbooks guarantee that security protocols are followed consistently throughout a company's SOC.

When an issue happens, SOAR systems may immediately take action thanks to rule sets called playbooks. Using SOAR playbooks, security teams can manage alerts more efficiently and reliably, establish automated responses for various incident types, and promptly address issues. Security teams may use SOAR playbooks to create procedures that require little to no human interaction. These playbooks also help with automated incident investigation, threat intelligence enrichment, incident actioning like blocking malicious indicators of compromise (IOCs), and automated threat data dissemination to security tools like SIEMs, firewalls, threat intelligence platforms (TIPs), incident response platforms, and others.

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Why are SOAR Playbooks Needed?

SOAR playbooks allow security teams to speed up and simplify time-consuming tasks. These playbooks, which may combine security tools and create smooth configurable processes, enable security teams to automate monotonous and repetitive operations, freeing up human analysts for more essential duties that need human intellect and decision making. Modern security playbooks now include 'holdable'characteristics that allow them to combine human decision making with automation in very critical security circumstances. With significant productivity increases and time savings across total security operations, security teams may quickly go from overwhelmed to operating at peak efficiency.

Benefits of SOAR Playbooks

  • Standardized Processes: SOAR solutions stand in for security analysts, relieve them of boring jobs, and include these activities into the entire process of dealing with any event. A strong SOAR system includes these duties into playbooks that outline the incident response step by step.
  • Streamlined Operations: Every feature of SOAR playbooks helps to streamline security operations. While security orchestration collects data from numerous sources, security automation uses automated playbooks to handle low-priority alerts and events.
  • Technology and Tools Integration: A SOAR playbook may be incorporated with products spanning a wide range of security technologies, including cloud security, forensics and malware analysis, vulnerability and risk management, data enrichment, threat intelligence, incident response, and endpoint security. These technologies can be seamlessly integrated into a SOAR system.

SOAR vs. SIEM

Many people consider SOAR and SIEM to be similar technologies since they both identify security concerns and collect data about the nature of the problem. They also handle alerts that security staff might utilize to resolve issues. There are, nevertheless, considerable distinctions between them. SOAR, like SIEM, uses a centralized platform to collect data and inform security personnel, but SIEM solely alerts security analysts.SOAR security, on the other hand, augments the investigation path with automation and reaction by utilizing automated playbooks or workflows and artificial intelligence (AI) to understand pattern behaviors, allowing it to detect similar risks before they occur. Because SOARs, such as Cortex XSOAR, usually ingest warnings from sources that SIEMs do not cover, such as vulnerability scan findings, cloud security alerts, and IoT device alerts, it is simpler to deduplicate alerts, which is a common use case for SOAR and SIEM connections.

What Is Threat Intelligence Management (TIM)?

A SOAR Platform may feature Threat Intelligence Management, or TIM, in addition to security orchestration, automation, and response. Threat intelligence management (TIM) allows enterprises to get a better understanding of the global threat landscape, predict attackers' future movements, and respond quickly to halt assaults.

Threat intelligence and threat intelligence management are not the same thing. Threat intelligence is the collection, normalization, enrichment, and determining of data about potential attackers and their intentions, motivations, and capabilities. Threat intelligence management is the collection, normalization, enrichment, and determination of data about potential attackers and their intentions, motivations.This data may assist firms in making faster, more informed security choices, allowing them to be better prepared for cyber - threats.

Why Is SOAR Important?

Organizations now confront multiple cybersecurity issues in an ever-growing and increasingly digital environment. The more complicated and vicious the attacks, the more corporations must devise an efficient and successful strategy for the future of their security operations. SOAR is transforming the way security operations teams handle, evaluate, and respond to alerts and threats as a result of this requirement. Security Operations teams are now faced with manually addressing thousands of alerts on a daily basis, which leaves space for errors and huge operational inefficiencies, not to mention inefficient, siloed, and antiquated security systems, as well as a serious shortage of experienced cybersecurity professionals. Many security operations teams are trying to link the noise from various systems, resulting in too many error-prone manual procedures and a scarcity of highly experienced staff to handle it all.

SOAR enables you to:

  • Integrate security, IT operations and threat intelligence tools: To reach a more thorough degree of data collecting and analysis, you may integrate all of your different security solutions, including ones from different manufacturers. Security teams may cease managing many consoles and tools.
  • View everything in one place: Your security team has access to a centralized console that contains all of the information required to investigate and resolve events.Security teams may get the information they want in a single location.
  • Speed incident response: SOARs have been shown to lower both the mean time to detect (MTTD) and the mean time to respond (MTTR) (MTTR). Because many activities are automated, a high number of events may be handled automatically and instantly.
  • Prevent time-consuming actions: SOAR significantly lowers false positives, repetitive procedures, and manual processes that consume security analysts' time.
  • Access better intelligence: SOAR solutions gather and analyze data from threat intelligence platforms, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, SIEMs, and other technologies, delivering context and insight to your security team.This speeds up the settlement of problems and the improvement of procedures. When issues arise, analysts are better positioned to conduct deeper and broader investigations.
  • Improve reporting and communication: Stakeholders may obtain all the information they need, including clear metrics that assist them determine ways to optimize procedures and minimize reaction times, when all security operations activities are pooled in one location and shown in easy dashboards.
  • Boost decision-making ability: SOAR systems are designed to be user-friendly, even for inexperienced security analysts, with features such as pre-built playbooks, drag-and-drop functionalities for creating playbooks from scratch, and automatic alert prioritizing. Furthermore, a SOAR tool may collect data and provide insights that make it easier for analysts to analyze incidents and conduct appropriate remediation measures.

The Value of Having and Using SOAR

SOAR is valuable to businesses and organizations because it lessens the effect of all sorts of security events, maximizes the value of current security investments, and reduces the risk of legal exposure and company disruption overall. SOAR helps companies in resolving and overcoming security concerns by enabling them to:

  • Unify their existing security systems and centralize data collection : to get complete visibility, significantly boosting the company's security posture as well as operational efficiency and productivity.
  • Automate repetitive manual tasks: and manage all parts of the security incident lifecycle, enhancing analyst productivity and freeing up analysts to focus on security rather than manual activities..
  • Define incident analysis and response procedures: In addition, security playbooks may be used to prioritize, standardize, and scale response operations in a consistent, visible, and documented manner.
  • Engage in faster incident response : Because analysts can rapidly and effectively evaluate and assign incident severity levels to security alerts, notifications are reduced and alert fatigue is reduced.
  • Streamline processes and operations : to detect and handle possible risks more effectively, both proactive and reactive.
  • Supports real-time collaboration : and unstructured investigations by directing each security occurrence to the analyst most qualified to respond to it, while also enabling simple communication and monitoring across teams and team members.

Aspire Other Consulting provides services through eight practices

Aspire delivers excellence and certainty across all of your enterprise IT needs. Learn more about the following areas:

  • Cyber Security Consulting
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  • Human Capital Management
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  • Finance and Accounting

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