Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) is a technology that helps security teams coordinate incident response actions. It eliminates many of the repetitive, time-consuming manual tasks involved in investigating security events, and enables automation between different security tools. 

Without SOAR, security professionals must manually investigate suspicious events. That means using multiple tools—often more than 40—to gather data and execute a response. Moving from one tool to another so often drags down performance, contributes to burnout, and introduces the risk of errors. 

The three components of SOAR, explained: 

SOAR combines three software capabilities to streamline security tasks and enable timely, accurate detection and response workflows. These three capabilities set the technology apart from other tools and solutions. 

1. Orchestration 

A modern Security Operations Center (SOC) uses many different software solutions to protect critical assets. These solutions often come from different vendors, who design their products with different assumptions in mind. As a result, they rarely integrate easily into an efficient, easy-to-use whole. 

SOAR solves this problem by acting as a centralized control console for your entire security tech stack. Instead of moving from one application to another, analysts can detect, investigate, and respond to unauthorized activity directly through a single platform. 

Centralizing security operations improves efficiency and eliminates production bottlenecks. It also reduces user friction stemming from inadequate permissions or training gaps. Even if a particular analyst isn’t familiar with one of your security tools, they can still manage it effectively through the SOAR platform. 

2. Automation 

SOAR enables automation across third-party security tools and applications. That eliminates a great deal of tedious, time-consuming work, while improving security event outcomes. This improves performance metrics like Mean Time-to-Detect and Mean Time-to-Respond as well. 

Many security tools feature automation, but not in a cross-platform way. With SOAR, you can configure conditions and triggers for incident response actions between multiple tools. For example, you might program one vendor’s Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) product to quarantine a device in response to an alert from another vendor’s Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platform. 

With expert configuration and fine-tuning, you can chain an entire sequence of automated incident response actions together. You can program different branches of actions to activate in response to pre-configured triggers. When an attacker performs the triggering action, an entire incident response playbook activates instantly in response. 

3. Response 

Orchestrating multiple vendors’ tools together and automating their actions allows organizations to closely coordinate their response to security threats. Security teams that take the time to develop detailed incident response playbooks can dramatically improve operational security while reducing the amount of time required to mitigate risk. 

This helps organizations adhere to popular incident response frameworks. Organizations pursuing compliance initiatives that rely on frameworks like NIST or SANS can pre-configure their security tools to operate according to those frameworks.  

This frees up the security team to spend less time manually investigating alerts. With a comprehensive set of highly automated playbooks enabled, security practitioners can focus on higher-impact strategic initiatives. 

What problems does SOAR solve? 

SOAR helps organizations address cybersecurity staffing shortages and address security performance bottlenecks. It reduces the amount of time security analysts must spend on time-consuming low-impact tasks, while enabling them to build and deploy complex automated response playbooks.  

This enhances the productivity of individual analysts, allowing them to achieve more in less time. It also improves the organization’s security posture against sophisticated threats. When threat activity in one segment of your network impacts assets in another, SOAR enables a coherent, coordinated response across the entire environment. 

SOAR also enriches and prioritizes threat data with contextual information drawn from across your tech stack. Instead of requiring analysts to check the reputation of assets implicated in an investigation, your SOAR platform can draw the appropriate data directly from a threat intelligence feed and present it. 

What kind of organizations benefit most from SOAR? 

The value of SOAR technology increases as the complexity of the organization’s IT environment increases. Multinational enterprises, government institutions, and other large organizations are the most obvious use cases for comprehensive SOAR implementation. 

Large enterprises can implement next-generation SIEM platforms that include SOAR capabilities as built-in features. When combined with behavioral analytics, this kind of consolidation offers comprehensive protection against a wide range of threats, from malware and ransomware to malicious insiders.  

However, small businesses and mid-sized enterprises often face similar obstacles when it comes to enabling security operations. Their security teams are smaller, yet they may face increased risk from opportunistic threat actors. At the same time, deploying consolidated enterprise security technologies may involve infeasible costs.  

In both cases, SOAR platforms enable security teams to do more with less. This is especially true when combined with scalable security services and on-demand expertise from a Managed Detection and Response (MDR) vendor. Having a capable MDR partner makes SOAR accessible for organizations of all sizes. 

How to deploy SOAR for optimal results 

SOAR products typically feature high-quality plug-and-play integrations with a wide variety of security tools. However, that does not mean your SOAR deployment should remain in its default configuration.  

All of the most valuable benefits of SOAR technology rely on customization. Your SOAR solution should be configured to take your organization’s unique security risk profile into account. Expert configuration is vital for identifying opportunities for cross-platform orchestration and eliminating the risk of misconfigured automation. 

Make SOAR the foundation of your security posture with Lumifi 

Lumifi leverages extensive expertise in SOAR technology, customization, and fine-tuning to help security teams maximize performance against advanced threats. Our team’s product knowledge and guidance can help you coordinate incident response and deploy intelligence automation across your entire security tech stack. Speak to an expert to find out more.