In 2019 alone, over $124 billion was spent on cybersecurity. In spite of this, however, many security teams are still struggling to keep up. Their challenges include having too many consoles to monitor, alert overload, a reliance on manual processes, and a shortage of cybersecurity personnel.
SOAR represents a new level of integrated incident response management designed for today’s larger, distributed, and highly dynamic and scalable networks.
Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR)
SOAR refers to technologies that enable organizations to collect inputs monitored by the security operations team. For example, alerts from the SIEM system and other security technologies — where incident analysis and triage can be performed by leveraging a combination of human and machine power — help define, prioritize and drive standardized incident response activities.
SOAR tools allow an organization to define incident analysis and response procedures in a digital workflow format.
What is orchestration?
Security orchestration is all about gathering information from a variety of sources and consolidating it in a useful way. For example, suppose you’ve found a suspicious file. To get an idea of the risk it poses, you want to know the source of the file and whether or not it contains any known malware. Getting these answers manually takes time — you’ll need to dig through some logs to find out where the file came from, and you’ll need to upload it to a service like VirusTotal to find out if it’s infected.
If you use a SOAR solution, however, you can ask it to carry out these tasks for you. The software does the necessary work behind the scenes, and presents you with the answers once it’s retrieved them. By providing quick access to valuable security information, SOAR makes investigations more efficient and gives you the information you need to make the best decisions possible.
What is automation?
Security automation refers to features that enable software to take action without human intervention. Automation isn’t a replacement for human analysts; instead, it reduces the time analysts spend on simple, repetitive tasks. This lets them spend more time focusing on more complex matters where their attention and expertise are genuinely needed.
By pairing automation with orchestration, you can set up rules to handle some of the most common events as soon as they occur. For instance, you can configure the software to check network traffic against a regularly updated list of malicious domains. If a machine in your environment repeatedly attempts to contact one of these domains, the software can automatically quarantine it until an analyst is available to investigate. In the meantime, the rest of the network is protected from the suspicious endpoint.
What is Response?
It is about responding to the INCIDENTS flagged by your integrated security systems.
Sets of rules called playbooks enable SOAR platforms to take action automatically when a particular kind of incident occurs. Using this functionality, you can set up automated responses for the most common incident types.
Following companies were identified as leaders in SIEM category, by Gartner (2020):
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IBM
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Splunk
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Securonix
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Rapid7
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Exabeam
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LogRhythm
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Dell Technologies (RSA)
This Article Was Written & published by Meena R, Senior Manager - IT, at Luminis Consulting Services Pvt. Ltd, India.
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