Coined by research company Gartner, Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) is a term used to describe the convergence of three distinct technology markets: security orchestration and automation, security incident response platforms (SIRP), and threat intelligence platforms (TIP).

SOAR technologies enable organizations to collect and aggregate vast amounts of security data and alerts from a wide range of sources. This assists human and machine-led analysis, as well as the standardization and automation of threat detection and remediation.

Manually detecting and responding to cyber-incidents is a time-killing and challenging task. Analysts struggle at the incident response phase because various repetitive actions need to be automated immediately.

Manually, analysts can't deal with the absurd number of security alerts received each day. However, if all these threats and warnings are not appropriately addressed, it will significantly increase the chances of a new incident.

Any machine-driven execution of a process can be called automation, just like that, here as well it is the machine-driven execution of security tools and I.T. systems as a part of "incident response."

Earlier these tasks were performed by humans, but now with the automation feature of the SOAR tools, the I.T. security team can formalize decision-making workflow, describe standardized automation steps, enforcement actions, and auditing capabilities.

For productive automation, the response tasks carried out by the automated systems must be defined sequentially. Automation offers both proactive as well as reactive security measures.

Proactively, the automation playbook can perform threat-hunting and security operations. It helps the analysts in identifying vulnerabilities or threats before the occurrence of a real incident. On the other hand, reactively, the automation playbook can monitor & track incident response metrics, perform case management, and carry out 'incident response.'

Security orchestration is the process of integrating different technologies and connecting various security tools (both non-security specific and security-specific) that includes modern SIEM tools to make them work together and enhancing the incident response. The intelligent integration of SIEM tools with the SOAR platform strengthens the organization’s security architecture.

In the present scenario, cyber-attacks are sophisticated and more frequent than before. Moreover, the organization's capability to respond to these attacks is inadequate and inefficient.

Manpower plays an essential role in security orchestration because automated solutions are somewhat incapable of spotting subtle signs of a threat or hack.

For instance, the alert system used by your SOAR security tools is not fully capable of determining whether an email is malicious or not. Instead, the users or the analyst have to act like Sherlock Holmes to look for any clues and ask themselves questions like:

          * Did any other system receive such an email?

          * What is the origin of the email or the I.P. address?

Since cyber-attacks and cybersecurity threats are continuously growing in number and becoming more complex, tackling them with effective SOAR security tools has become the need of the hour. Moreover, speed and accuracy are the two major requirements for every security expert in 2019.

Achieving maximum results with minimum resources may sound impossible, only if you are doing it manually. But practically speaking, it is possible with SOAR security tools.

For example, one of the SOAR vendor's customers received around 200 phishing alerts in a week. Now, without SOAR tools, it will require four hours for an analyst to remediate each alert, whereas, with SOAR, it will only take 15 minutes for each alert.

SOAR tools work closely with SIEM, the SOC’s central information system. SOAR tools leverage the integration with SIEM to:

          * Receive alerts and additional security data to identify security incidents

          * Draw in data required for analysts to further investigate an incident

          * Assist analysts in proactive incident response and threat hunting, which relies on querying and exploring cross-organization data