Soaring Above Challenges: Exploring the Power of SOAR Solutions

Managing Security Orchestration, Automation & Response

In an era defined by technological advancements and a growing threat landscape, organisations face an ever-increasing need for robust and efficient cybersecurity measures. Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) solutions have emerged as a crucial component in the arsenal of cybersecurity professionals.

According to a study by Orca Security, 59% of organizations collect more than 500 cloud security alerts per day—leading to a host of issues. For example, the same study found that more than half of critical alerts (55%) fail to be addressed on a routine basis (as often as every day), while 60% of respondents cite “alert fatigue” as a cause of internal friction.

So, how can your organisation manage such a high volume of alerts successfully and without overburdening your security team? By using an enterprise automation platform as your SOAR solution.

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What is SOAR?

SOAR is a type of solution that can collect security data from various sources and, depending on the incident it uncovers, trigger a workflow automation that’s geared towards addressing it.

The nuance lies in the type of tool that’s used. For example, many offer relatively basic workflow automation capabilities that only allow you to streamline the tedious parts of your incident management process. However, enterprise automation bucks this trend as it empowers your security team to build comprehensive and intelligent automations, quickly.

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An example of using enterprise automation as your SOAR solution

• Ingestion: an incident is detected by a 3rd-party system and ingested into the SOAR pipeline
• Enrichment: additional insights, such as when and where an incident took place, are added
• Triage: security analysts classify incidents, decide which to prioritise, and pinpoint the proper course of action for each
• Response: the response goes into action to remediate the issue and/or to prevent it from happening again

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Each of these steps can be automated with a SOAR tool, but by using an enterprise automation platform, the entire process can be automated seamlessly.

To help illustrate this idea, let’s cover an example where an alert gets created for an employee who’s visiting a website on their work-issued device that’s potentially malicious:

1. An application like Splunk detects an employee who’s browsing a domain that hasn’t been visited by any employee previously. The application goes on to create an alert for that activity.
2. An application like Virustotal checks the target domain’s reputation to determine whether it’s a malicious website.
3. Assuming the domain is deemed malicious, a security analyst gets notified of the alert via a message in an app like Slack.
4. Within the body of the message, the security analyst can review key details on the alert and take action with the click of a button; in this case, they’d disconnect the machine with a tool like SentinelOne.

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Benefits of using enterprise automation for SOAR

Here’s why you should use enterprise automation as your SOAR platform:

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Address incidents faster

By automatically creating alerts, routing them to the appropriate employees in near real-time, and allowing these employees to take action with ease, your organisation is more likely to resolve issues before they can cause meaningful damage. In addition, by sharing issues in the platform your security team already works in (your business communications platform), they’re more likely to uncover the issues on time.

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Enhance the employee experience

As our earlier example shows, security teams often rely on a variety of tools when performing incident management.

In the absence of enterprise automation, they would have to move back and forth between the tools to perform specific actions, which can be tedious and lead to harmful human errors (for example: alerting the wrong employee of an alert). Additionally, certain members of your team may rely on (or only have access to) specific security tools; and since each tool likely provides a narrow view of the security activities at your organisation, employees end up with an incomplete picture of what is taking place.

An enterprise automation platform neatly addresses each issue outlined above as it can keep data across your systems automatically in sync and engage with employees in the place they are already working in (your business communications platform).

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Focus on more complex and unique issues

Unfortunately, not every security issue can be resolved through automation. There are always exceptions and novel concerns that demand time and attention from your team. But if you use enterprise automation to streamline the rest of your security processes, your team should have the resources to take on such issues.

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Experience a fast time to value

Despite its powerful and comprehensive features, an enterprise automation platform manages to still offer a low-code/no-code UX. This allows less technically skilled employees within security, among other functions, to grow comfortable with the platform in a short timeframe. In addition, it can offer pre-built connectors with applications like Splunk, ServiceNow, Okta, DataDog, and PagerDuty, among many others, as well as customisable automation templates for security-specific workflows. Taken together, these pre-built assets can help ensure that your teams are able to envisage and implement automations quickly.

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MBA: your SOAR solution

In partnership with Workato, leader in enterprise automation, MBA offers all of these features as well as a SOAR Accelerator—a pre-built, customisable automation solution that lets you streamline your incident workflow end-to-end.

Talk to one of our SOAR experts today, click here for a call back or call us on 020 3815 6680