There is no respite in the volume of attacks. It has only plummeted to dizzy heights. Cyberwars can only get more sophisticated with the increasing complexity of threats. The global cybersecurity spending might cross over a billion dollars in the days to come. The rise in spending is due to an increase in the cost of security incidents, snowballing every year. The mean time to detect and mean time to respond must be reduced to save these costs and ensure compliance. Regulatory laws also demand timely responses to an incident. Rapid detection and response are a priority that is enabled only through a reliable and repeatable process that rapidly detects and resolves incidents.
Relying on analysts to choose a course of action from security playbooks would be risky as the decisions are limited to their experience and knowledge. The more manual the process is, the more difficult and time-consuming it is to act on a security incident. These incidents are dynamic and complex, requiring a robust management process. If left unchecked, the incidents can cause damages, whose outcomes are scary. What is the best way to identify and fix them?
The answer is SOAR: Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) solutions.
Enterprise security ecosystems of today consist of multiple solutions from various vendors. Coordinating them into one reliable process is a task. When prioritizing and responding to a threat, analysts manually deal with many siloed solutions and correlate the information to take an informed decision. Manual interventions such as these can cause inefficiencies. SOAR helps in orchestrating these technologies – integrating them, including people and processes into a complete security program. Automation is the other key feature of SOAR that reduces process time, enabling better efficiencies in the orchestration of people, processes, and technologies. By automating repeatable processes, analysts can focus on areas that need active human interventions, relieving them of doing mundane tasks. Automation allows human involvement only in critical areas – such as enriching alert data and containment actions on particular indicators or hosts.
The increase in security alerts calls for faster decisions. A linear playbook is incapable of dealing with these demands. Orchestration and automation enable better flexibility through automated decision making driven by run books. Be in any number of alerts, runbooks enable automated processes of varying workflows. SOAR can also automate the recommendation of the right playbooks, runbooks, or actions for incidents that might not have been documented.
SOAR also provides valuable data to enable informed decisions and proactive threat hunting. Analysts can use this data derived from events, IoC, threat intelligence, or incident trends/correlation to prioritize, investigate, contain, or remove threats. Every data or information can also be visualized and displayed in interactive dashboards.
SOAR Advantages
SOAR is customizable and flexible in implementation. It allows the inclusion of every use case to be integrated with any security tool. SOAR features are easy to use and are an ideal fit to maximize security ROI. Security products can be easily integrated through bi-directional or uni-directional integrations, and data ingestion is supported through unstructured intel feeds or data that supports STIX/TAXII standards.
SOAR is exceptional in managing the whole incident management cycle. You can track and manage incident cases, record incident actions, and get critical metrics on KPIs. Other features include task management, managing assets impacted in the incident, custody management, sample tracking, managing reports, and keeping track of time and money involved.
The big advantage of SOAR is its ability to automate and coordinate processes. Process automation reduces manual interventions of repetitive tasks. SOAR automates processes through playbooks and runbooks. SOAR allows manual intervention in a process, only when needed. The ability to enable both manual and automated interference in the process brings flexibility and ease of use.
A SOAR platform is capable of contextualizing threat intelligence. It can automatically correlate threat intelligence data to uncover patterns of attacks, vulnerabilities, and risks. Automation in correlation helps analysts act faster during an incident response process. Analysts can also leverage visual dashboards in the platform to analyze threat intelligence. Teams can ingest and securely share intelligence data for effective collaboration. SOAR ensures secure isolation of customer data and allows multiple instances of a single host.
SOAR is a powerful security enablement tool and not meant to replace skilled security analysts. It enhances an analyst’s productivity by enabling better outcomes. SOAR is vastly different from a SIEM. They are not the same. SOAR picks up where SIEM ends. A SOAR covers up SIEM incident response limitations by enabling automated orchestrated responses across incident identification, containment, removal, and recovery cycle.
To know more about how SOAR capabilities can help your organization, do get in touch with our experts at contact@aujas.com.
