Almost every week, there is a new headline about a high-profile cybersecurity incident with a major company. But for every high-profile incident that makes the news, countless small to medium-sized businesses are dealing with their own cybersecurity incidents.

The threat has never been higher, meaning businesses need to be proactive and leverage the latest technology to help them automate and streamline their cybersecurity efforts. Automation allows companies to offload the repetitive tasks necessary for cybersecurity so their SecOps team members can focus on higher-level priorities.

The results are lower costs, higher security, and team members who are free to stay one step ahead of threats instead of being bogged down by countless alerts.

Today, smart businesses implement an automated cybersecurity strategy through the use of SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) solutions. These solutions allow organizations to deal with security issues at scale and with maximum efficiency.

To help you understand how a SOAR solution can benefit your business, we’ll explore what SOAR means in real security terms and how it differs from similar solutions you may be familiar with.

What is SOAR in Cyber Security?

Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) is a technology that centralizes and automates your business's threat detection, alerts, and responses to those issues. It also helps to automate the communication between team members responding to cybersecurity threats.

The goal is to make businesses more agile in responding to security threats. Centralizing threat data also helps improve forecasting and prevent future attacks by analyzing patterns and creating data-driven threat profiles.

In practice, your SOAR solution will receive threat alerts and threat data. In response, it will execute playbooks, which are predetermined automated actions to deal with the alert. Depending on the situation and the playbook created, these actions can range from notification to remediation.

The goal of a SOAR solution is to automate as much of the threat alert and response process as possible. This automation helps you scale your cybersecurity strategy without significantly increasing your security budget. Secondly, it ensures that every alert is handled according to a preset protocol.

Without this automation, a Security Operations team can be overwhelmed with alerts, and certain threats can fall through the cracks. A SOAR solution helps prevent this while allowing your SecOps team to focus on the most critical issues that deliver the highest security returns.

Let's use a phishing email threat as an example to help you understand how this functions in a real-world setting.

When a potential phishing email is detected, the SOAR solution can execute a playbook related to that threat. This action can include capturing IP addresses, sender data, and other related information. The SOAR solution then compares these indicators of compromise (IoCs) to determine the threat level and what to do next.

The response can range from doing nothing if no threat is confirmed to alerting certain personnel and even automatically quarantining endpoint devices if the threat is deemed serious enough.

In many cases, threats are handled in a fully automated fashion while your SecOps teams are kept informed via reporting. This method allows you to scale your security to deal with more threats without adding new team members.

Benefits of SOAR Cybersecurity for Mid-Size Companies

SOAR's core benefits are improved security, lower costs, and streamlined security processes. But how exactly does SOAR achieve these benefits?

Below, we'll discuss how SOAR delivers these efficiencies and improves security.

Centralization

A SOAR solution allows your business to combine all your security tools and solutions into one centralized platform. This centralization even works across different vendors, so your team no longer has to deal with various systems.

Improved Speed  & Agility

Speed is crucial when it comes to detecting threats and neutralizing them. KPIs such as mean-time-to-detection(MTTD) and mean-time-to-respond (MTTR) can both be improved through a SOAR solution.

Since many threats are dealt with automatically without human intervention, your MTTD and MTTR are all lowered substantially.

But it's more than metrics; improving response times dramatically improves security and lowers your overall risk profile.

Less Wasted Effort

Without a SOAR solution, most threats and alerts are handled manually. While this may be appropriate for some threats, most of these issues can be dealt with through automated processes.

Another benefit is that false positives virtually never reach the level of human intervention. This greatly frees up your SecOps teams' valuable time, which isn't wasted on repetitive tasks that don't provide a high return.

More Complete Data For Machine Learning & AI Threat Detection

Since a SOAR solution integrates your many tools and vendors, you can combine the data for complete AI detection of threats and vulnerabilities before a security issue occurs.

Besides threat detection, your reporting will be more precise, allowing managers and other stakeholders to measure improvements more accurately.

SOAR Security Vendors

Today, businesses have a great deal of choice when selecting a SOAR security vendor. Well-known providers such as IBM, Palo Alto Networks, and Microsoft provide SOAR solutions, each with their own benefits and drawbacks.

Choosing the right solution is critical, and that’s where Hypershift Technology can be your trusted security partner.

Our security engineers have experience deploying all of the major SOAR security solutions. We can analyze your current IT infrastructure and risk profile and provide the ultimate strategy to help you reduce costs while improving overall security using SOAR.

If your business needs help implementing a robust and cost-effective cybersecurity strategy, contact Hypershift today to learn more about SOAR implementation.

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SOAR vs SIEM: What’s the Difference?

You may already be familiar with SIEM (Security Information and Event Management). SIEM is sometimes confused with SOAR solutions, but they have key differences and serve different purposes.

SIEM tools focus on collecting logs and data from various sources for analysis. Potential threats are determined during analysis, and then your SecOps teams can take the necessary action.

SIEM tools provide a valuable function in modern cybersecurity, but they don’t provide tools to carry out actions once threats are detected automatically. With a SOAR solution, the main focus is providing automated responses to common security threats and alerts.

As we described earlier, this automation is carried out via playbooks. A SOAR is based on security triggers that activate a playbook. The playbook then uses automation to identify the threat, remediate it, or pass it on for further analysis.

SIEM solutions are critical for analyzing large amounts of data and finding threats within that data. A SOAR is used to carry out specific actions for already-defined threats.

It’s important to know that these two technologies do not have to operate separately. Integrating your SIEM with a SOAR solution improves overall security and efficiency by combining threat detection with automated responses.

In a typical integration scenario, your SOAR solution will ingest alerts from your SIEM and then carry out the playbook related to that alert.

If you’re already using a SIEM solution, adding a SOAR platform will improve your overall security. It will also help you leverage automation to reduce costs and free your team from mundane and repetitive tasks that impede productivity.

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