In today’s cybersecurity standards, timing is critically important. Threats are getting more sophisticated by the minute, and response windows are shrinking. SIEM platforms are adept at collecting, correlating, and analysing security data, but often fall short of full-scale incident response. Enter SOAR, or Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response.
The union of SIEM and SOAR combines powerful data insights with intelligent automation, enabling organizations to detect, analyse, and respond to threats faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Now we can define what this integration might look like, the main benefits and challenges it would face, and best practices.
What is SIEM?
SIEM tools, by definition, fall into a single category and therefore reaffirm the claim that SIEM collects and aggregates logs, particularly security logs, from all nooks and corners of the entire organization’s IT Infrastructure. The powers of SIEM enable security teams to identify and monitor suspicious activities, prioritize alerts, and take the necessary steps for compliance.
SIEM centralises security monitoring to a single monitoring point. However, the drawback is that SIEM tools are traditionally biased toward manual investigation and response under a lot of noise to distract analysts, with insufficient information and time.
What is SOAR?
SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) platforms automate routine security tasks, orchestrate the workflow between disparate tools, and help speed up incident response. SOAR will ingest alerts generated from the SIEM tool, enrich them with contextual data, and execute predefined playbooks for containment, remediation, or escalation.
In a nutshell, SIEM detects, while SOAR reacts.
Why Integrate SIEM with SOAR?
1. Faster Threat Mitigation
Simply put, the adverse occurrence is the automation of another opportunity for response with the integration. For example, a login attempt is identified as being suspicious by a SIEM. The SOAR would then be able to check that user’s behavior across various systems, check threat intelligence feeds, isolate the impacted endpoint or disable user credentials, and then alert the security team-proceeding through an entire cycle in a few seconds.
This threat has since minimized the response time from hours to minutes and has hence avoided a potential amount of damage.
- Modernised Workflows
In fact, security teams are trying to use so many different types of security products, from endpoint protection to firewalls, identity management, and cloud-based solutions. Now, enter SOAR. It not only serves as the glue in the integration of these technologies, but it also makes the whole thing into a centralized and automated process that is actuated by SIEM alerts.
- Reduced Analyst Fatigue
One of the problems with SIEMS is false positives. SOAR helps alleviate this by automating a lot of the triaging work, along with excluding all the ambient noise so that analysts can spend time on those important threats. This increases efficiency and reduces analyst fatigue for the team.
- Incident Documentation Enhanced
SOAR platforms retain activity records continuously from alert generation to incident remediation. This, therefore, brings transparency, aids post-mortem review processes, and complements compliance audits.
Key Use Cases
- Phishing Detection: The detection of any suspicious mail in SIEM would trigger SOAR to automatically extract indicators, perform reputation checks, quarantine the mail, and alert the Information Technology department.
- Insider Threat Detection: Anomalous behavior flagged in SIEM → SOAR then correlates that with HR data, user history, and access logs to arrive at risk computations.
- Malware Containment: Malware hash detected by SIEM → SOAR then isolates the affected endpoint, triggers the antivirus engine to scan it, and blocks similar hashes network-wide.
Conclusion
Whirling within the interplay of SIEM and SOAR is not a trend, but rapidly turning into a necessity for state-of-the-art cybersecurity. By integrating visibility along with intelligent automation, much can be accomplished in the drastic reduction of time for the detection and response to threats, improving the analyst efficiency degree, and, additionally, strengthening overall resilience in the organization.
Since the threats are evolving, this question has become moot- should we or should we not adopt SIEM and SOAR? The remaining question is how fast we can make these two work together.
