SOAR

What Is SOAR?

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) comprises technologies that assist enterprises and organizations in gathering diverse information monitored by security operations and maintenance (O&M) teams. It analyzes incidents and categorizes alarms using this information. SOAR utilizes playbooks to guide the human-machine interaction, aiding security O&M personnel in defining, organizing, and initiating standardized incident response procedures.

Why do we need SOAR？

Given the intensifying battle between cyber attacks and defenses, relying solely on preventive measures is no longer sufficient for network security. Detection and response strategies are now crucial. Enterprises and organizations must develop a comprehensive security system that combines blocking, detection, response, and prevention, assuming that the network will be targeted.

Against this backdrop, there has been a notable surge in interest in detection and response products. These tools enable users to detect attacks and intrusions more accurately and with a lower mean time to detect (MTTD). However, while these products excel at detection, they often fall short in reducing the mean time to recovery (MTTR). For users, the ability to respond quickly to issues is often more critical than swiftly detecting them. To enhance security response efficiency, security personnel must consider not just individual endpoints or networks, but the overall security operations and management (O&M) of the entire network. This requires integrating disparate detection and response mechanisms, that is why we need SOAR.

Key Functions of SOAR

• SOAR can classification and prioritization of alarms: This feature allows the operations team to concentrate on threat alarms with a major adverse effect or that causes severe harm to the organization, thereby alleviating alarm fatigue.

• SOAR facilitates case set management and collaboration: Case sets encapsulate response and handling experiences, serving as references for security analysts to enhance analysis efficiency. Advanced functionalities can be enabled through technologies such as feature extraction and machine learning.

• SOAR enables orchestration and automation: This capability consolidates various security tools into a single process and executes them automatically, greatly enhancing operational efficiency and minimizing the impact of threats on the network.

• SOAR can conduct threat intelligence investigations: This feature leverages threat intelligence databases to offer forensic information for identifying threats, thereby enhancing the accuracy of threat handling. This process can be integrated into a workflow, enabling the selection of the best response method based on the forensic result. Architecturally, SOAR ensures high reliability and availability through redundancy and elastic scaling. It emphasizes orchestration execution performance, provides comprehensive permission management, and supports deployment both on-premises and in the cloud.

Advantages of SOAR

• SOAR can reduce alert fatigue. SOAR defines as a solution that integrates incident response, orchestration, automation, and threat intelligence. Previously, these technologies were offered to customers as separate products. However, relying on numerous single-point solutions can strain budgets and workforce resources. The complexity and repetitiveness of these tools can overwhelm administrators with a high volume of daily alerts, leading to alarm fatigue. By combining these functions and automating processes, SOAR effectively reduces unnecessary alarms.

• SOAR offers significant benefits in enhancing security operations. Firstly, it improves response speed by proactively preventing threats from causing harm to the network environment. As attacks propagate rapidly, simply detecting potential threats and sending alarms is insufficient. Secondly, SOAR enhances security operational efficiency and incident resolution rates by integrating multiple phases—such as forensic investigation, handling, and notification—into a single workflow. This automation reduces the need for operations personnel to switch between different tools, thereby improving overall security operational efficiency in the face of increasing threats. Thirdly, In hard coding mode, implementing customers' new service requirements can only be done through version upgrades. For on-premises deployments, the lengthy iteration periods of versions can negatively impact customer satisfaction. However, the inherent low-code orchestration capability of SOAR opens up new possibilities. With this capability, security operations teams can easily create and enhance workflows, enabling customers to quickly implement requirement changes.

• SOAR can gather operational experience in security operations By orchestrating playbooks, the process of handling threats can be transformed into a workflow that can be saved for future use. This enables the accumulation and consolidation of security operational experience. Moreover, the case set summarizes historical threat handling experiences and supplements features, providing a reference for security experts.