As organizations plan to protect themselves from potential threats, the two intertwining trends need to be addressed: organizational migration to the cloud and the current gap in cybersecurity skills. For bringing the balance back in their favor, the security operations centers (SOCs) are trying to create greater efficiencies for threat detection and neutralization processes to confront the attacks.

Given the troublesome nature of the problem, organizations are continuously making efforts to automate the network security process and lessen the burden of their security teams. In the endless quest to stay a step ahead of the cyber attackers, an increasing number of enterprises are turning toward a relatively new category of security tools: security automation and orchestration solutions.

 According to a report by Gartner, less than 1 percent of businesses with more than five IT security professionals were using SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) tools by the end of 2017.
However, it also reported that by 2020, 15% of the organizations will be using these SOAR tools.

Also, the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) found a higher number of enterprises using security automation and orchestration tools, and vendors have taken note of this rising interest in SOAR technology.

SOAR technologies

Gartner talks about SOAR solutions as tools allow an organization to define incident analysis and response procedures in a digital workflow format, in a way that a range of machine-driven activities can be automated.

SOAR does not carry a single solution to any problem; it covers a range of functionalities, which include incident response, case management, security automation, and other security tools. These tools function intending to help SOCs maintain the efficiency that will be further used to monitor organizational networks effectively.

Therefore, SOAR technologies take the help of customizable workflows and control functionalities, which help teams to identify potential threats easily within the organizational networks, while saving time in the process. Analysts do not have to jump between various solution platforms. Instead, they can respond to the issues immediately while taking additional help from their case playbooks.

The SOAR technologies have at least two capabilities:

Security automation

It is about handling a task without needing any manual intervention. For example, security automation can provision or de-provision new users, query logs, handle other tasks without involving any other staff member. And when a security automation tool is also an orchestration tool, it performs automation of tasks that would otherwise need the use of 1 security tool.

Security orchestration

It is about integrating cybersecurity and IT operations so that they can work together and build the environment in the same direction. The integration and correlation allow looking at the alerts coming from several cybersecurity tools to discover and resolve the root cause of the problem.

Benefits of SOAR technologies

For any organization, easy implementation and comprehension of any new technology require a lot of research and valuable data. It is required for any group of stakeholders and leaders to learn the benefits before bringing in new technology in their business environment. Below mentioned are the benefits of SOAR for improving organizational IT security:

Streamlined operations

Every element of SOAR technologies contributes to the streamlining of security operations. The first half of the technology aggregates data incoming from a variety of sources. It also moves beyond the reactionary models, and be proactive in defending the organization from threats through the means of defense strategies.

Minimize manual operations

The technology of security automation and orchestration relieves SOC analysts from mundane and repetitive tasks of handling any given incident. The SOAR platforms incorporate the tasks that detail out end-to-end incident response steps for every condition.

Generates low costs

Once an organization implements a SOAR platform into the business model, they can enjoy savings across playbook creation, shift management, analyst training, reporting, and alert handling.

Better response time

It is the security orchestration that sums up all the related alerts from different systems into a single system. Security automation saves time and human intervention by directly responding to the alerts.

Tool integration

The SOAR platform is capable of integrating the products across various security technologies, such as cloud security, endpoint security, email security, IT and infrastructure, data enrichment, and threat intelligence.

Automated metrics and reporting

Instead of spending valuable time in collecting and sorting through metrics and reports, analysts make use of robust SOAR solution and generate daily weekly or monthly reports that include all kinds of activities.

So whether it is alert fatigue or information overload, your business can experience several threats daily, draining your SOC resources and slowing incident response time. Overall, these platforms relieve SOC analyst from time-consuming and critical tasks, while allowing the analysts to improve SOC’s overall effectiveness in responding to incidents.