The rise of Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) security solutions pose a challenge to businesses of all sizes. Even as enterprises adopt them, the use-cases for these cybersecurity tools continue to develop. What, exactly, can SOAR actually offer organizations in practical terms?
To answer these questions, the editors at Solutions Review decided to explore some of the major use cases of SOAR solutions. Today, we start with one of the most prominent letters in the SOAR acronym: “A” for automation.
SOAR and Automation: What’s the Problem?
Of course, we could retitle the above with “why does your business need automation in its cybersecurity?”
Here, present two key examples:
The Evolving Nature of Digital Threats
Hackers rarely take a holiday. Instead, they continue to innovate their malware and cyber attacks. Therefore, cyber-attacks become ever more evasive, damaging, and difficult to remove. Moreover, hackers learned long ago how to make their attacks look innocuous at first or second glance. The task of simply finding a dwelling threat on the network can take up a great deal of your IT security team’s time.
After all, can you identify at a glance which applications have malicious intent? Or where all of your databases are located in an increasingly complex environment? Obviously, you can manually perform threat hunting, but that still requires resources and commitments. Some enterprises even resort to hiring weekend threat hunters. Needless the same, this costs a considerable amount.
These questions should give anyone pause. Especially if you feel any sort of concern with your cybersecurity.
The Cybersecurity Staffing Shortage
According to the (ISC)² Cybersecurity Workforce Study:
- 63% of enterprises need more cybersecurity staff.
- 59% of enterprises face increased risk due to the cybersecurity staffing crisis.
- 36% of respondents refer to the skills gap as their top concern.
- Currently, there is a workforce gap of nearly 3 million professionals.
Therefore, most business cybersecurity professionals find themselves overworked in understaffed offices; they must confront thousands of potential security alerts every day; even legacy solutions can discover hundreds of potential indicators of breaches, leading to a flood of alerts. With no way to determine false positives without investigation, burnout frequently occurs.
Any tool that can help your IT security team automate its investigations can reduce costs and stress. Hence, automation via SOAR solutions.
What SOAR Automation Can Offer Your Enterprise
First, we must answer what exactly SOAR solutions can offer your enterprise. Essentially, these solutions facilitate threat analysis and remediation; additionally, it can aggregate inputs from disparate sources including SIEM solutions, firewalls, and authentication tools. With this information, SOAR solutions can apply automated workflows or remediation playbooks.
Most prominently, SOAR can provide machine-led automation; this uses artificial intelligence and threat intelligence to speed up critical cybersecurity processes like threat hunting. Additionally, SOAR automation can fill in gaps left behind by the cybersecurity staffing challenges; you can rely on fewer IT security professionals while still improving their efficiency.
Also, automation in cybersecurity can help facilitate incident response, improving its speed beyond what manual processes can achieve. After all, it can automate hundreds of actions inherent in the incident response process. Instead of having analysts analyze hundreds of alerts generated by SIEM, SOAR can automate the investigation process; further, it can automate decision-making workflows, define remediation actions, and monitor security events.
How to Learn More
You can learn more about SOAR solutions and their automation capabilities in our SOAR Buyer’s Guide. We also dive into the top providers and their key capabilities.
Ben Canner
Ben Canner is an enterprise technology writer and analyst covering Identity Management, SIEM, Endpoint Protection, and Cybersecurity writ large. He holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from Clark University in Worcester, MA. He previously worked as a corporate blogger and ghost writer. You can reach him via Twitter and LinkedIn.