SOAR has been garnering a lot of interest in the past few years. SOAR stands for Security Orchestration Automation & Response. A SOAR allows organizations to collect large amounts of data and alerts from different detection sources. It helps execute, coordinate, and automate tasks, enabling organizations to respond quickly to cyberattacks and improve their overall security posture. 

SOAR platforms or tools focus on a few areas within security: 

1. Threat and vulnerability management

2. Security operations automation

3. Incident response

A few challenges that organizations face: 

• An overload of alerts and increasingly complex security threats.

• Security systems & tools which do not communicate and integrate well with each other.

• The analysts need to go through many disparate tools to prioritize, triage, investigate, and resolve security threats.

• Often detections & response techniques are very manual and poorly documented.

• The inability to find highly skilled people to fulfill the job.

SOAR features & benefits:

• Orchestration & Automation

Orchestration & Automation capabilities within a SOAR platform or tool allow the security team to plug into various security tools that are in use through API's. This helps create runbooks or workflows that an analyst can take to respond to a specific alert. It can help automate daily tasks and save time by ensuring that processes and incidents are addressed promptly, increasing the team's overall efficiency. 

• Ability to investigate and conduct quality intelligence

Once the orchestration and automation have been performed, an analyst would have to investigate these alerts and incidents. A SOAR helps security teams become more intelligent-driven by aggregating data from multiple sources, including SIEM, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems. It, in return, leads to better and quicker decisions regarding an incident on how to perform activities such as remediations, escalation, etc. 

• Improve Reporting and Enhance Incident Response

While investigating, an immediate response is vital to minimize the spread of the threat and disruption within an organization. SOAR aids in reducing the meantime to detect and mean time to respond by detecting and remediating alerts in minutes. A SOAR allows the visibility of the actions performed by an analyst or team member. Reporting can also provide an analyst with issues based on historical data. It can also help the team analyze what tool is better at alerting or remediation, what processes work and which ones don't. Therefore, an added advantage is that a security team can react and resolves problems and incident in real-time by consolidating all of your security tools into one platform to prevent potential breaches from spreading. 

• Have a centralized solution with Standardized processes. 

A centralized solution provides the ability to maintain regulatory and internal compliance better. It provides a faster response time and gives the security team the ability to handle a large volume of alerts.