A CTO’s View on the Future of SOAR
Though security threats can never be fully exterminated, they can be vastly reduced and well-managed with Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) that holds a key role in Security Operations Center (SOC). Learn how SOAR can help overburdened security analysts automate repetitive security operations, allowing them to tackle more complex tasks.
Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) has made quite the entrance in the cybersecurity world and occupies an immensely valuable role at the heart of modern SOCs. Michele Zambelli, CTO at DFLabs writes SOAR, a relatively young technology has arrived just at the right time and holds the promise to become the connecting tissue in large enterprise security environments otherwise marred by false alerts and tool sprawl.
The advancement of technology is often prompted by the problems older technologies couldn’t resolve. The same goes for security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), which is deemed as a turning point in the world of cybersecurity.
The cybersecurity community is facing a skill shortage that is drastically increasing. A 1.8 million security workers shortage is estimated by the year 2022, which means that it will probably require security teams to do more with fewer resources.
While that seems impossible, it is probable, and in fact achievable, and the best shot security platforms have of achieving that is by applying a revolutionary technology that is designed to bind and vastly enhance security teams — SOAR.
Learn More: 5 Ways SOAR Helps Protect Remote Workers from Emerging Cyber Threats
How Does SOAR Fit in Today’s Security Environments?
In order to learn about the future of SOAR, we must first take a step back and analyze the necessities that prompted the genesis of this technology. The very premise around which SOAR is built is orchestration and automation.
What SOAR tries to do is untangle the myriad of complex security operations and put order into processes that will ultimately result in saved time, saved costs, and more effective incident response.
In order to accomplish that, SOAR relies on a machine learning engine that adapts to every environment it interacts with. That’s the beauty of SOAR.
Unlike SIEM, which is great at detecting threats but requires constant tweaking, updating, and monitoring, SOAR is far more independent and it actually saves analysts a lot of time by replacing human interaction and automating every mundane, repetitive task that can be automated. However, the mere application of automation doesn’t necessarily mean that all human interaction is redundant. The degree of automation is adjustable, and security analysts and engineers choose which tasks they want to be fully automated, and in which tasks they want to include human expertise.
SOAR acts as a live organism adapting to the evolving circumstances, and due to its machine learning algorithm, SOAR is able to learn from its experience. SOAR studies every type of alert as it arrives in real-time. It learns its idiosyncrasies and uses the knowledge to create a proper countermeasure whenever an alert with similar characteristics is detected.
And when a similar threat is detected, SOAR will remember the pattern and apply the proper remediation measures to completely nullify the threat, or recommend appropriate actions if the degree of automation requires human intervention.
This is the area where SOAR excels at. It virtually saves analysts from having to investigate, analyze, and validate document alerts manually as it does the whole job for them. This not only saves time, but it allows analysts to have bigger satisfaction in their jobs as they have more free time to focus on more challenging tasks. And this is exactly why SOAR has positioned itself as an invaluable asset to the very core of every security operations center (SOC).
Even though SOAR as a technology is still very young, it has already proven to be a vital game-changer in cybersecurity environments. However, the mere thought of automating entire processes still sounds scary for many organizations. Many organizations have not yet matured enough to fully grasp the immense value SOAR brings at enhancing workflow processes, but the good thing is that many have already realized the enormous benefits of SOAR already.
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What Does the Short-Term Future Hold for SOAR?
As analysts become required to carry out their operations in a jungle of tools, it seems like SOAR was invented just in the nick of time. Even though SOAR adoption is still in its early stages, more and more SOCs and MSSPs have matured enough to realize that the application of SOAR is limitless.
At the moment, SOAR boosts several highly sensitive areas in cybersecurity:
- Automates repetitive tasks in standard operating procedures
- Vastly reduces incident response time
- Improves threat hunting by applying machine learning
- Enhances the collaboration of the entire security platform via orchestration
It is obvious that SOAR was created with the sole purpose of becoming a connective tissue within the entire security environment, bringing disconnected teams and tools together. Still, right now, the great majority of organizations that have implemented SOAR are largely big companies and enterprises, while smaller businesses are yet to tap into the potential of SOAR.
However, for malicious actors, small businesses are just as much a target as big organizations. But the far more important question is — with a wide range of threat detection technologies available, why should clients choose SOAR in particular?
Learn More: Automation in the SOC – What’s missing with SOAR and SIEM
The math is simple. The future holds even a bigger increase of cyber threats, and apart from relying on threat detection tools, SOCs will also need to incorporate automation to maximize the potential of their resources. And the shortage of security skills combined with the tightening of budgets and evolving sophisticated cyber threats will further drive the need of implementing a SOAR solution. And right now SOAR is the only technology to possess such contemporary capabilities that allow SOCs to automate repetitive security operations and carry out incident responses from inception to conclusion completely free of human interaction.
Bottom line, cyber threats are only going to become more sophisticated and hard to deal with in the future, and the sooner SOCs realize that the implementation of automation is not a luxury, yet a necessity, the better they will cope with the shortage of skills and yield a more stable cybersecurity posture. Thus, the future of cybersecurity, both long and short-term, have SOAR written all over it.
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