Best Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Software
Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) software products are tools used to help integrate security technologies and automate incident-related tasks. These tools integrate with a company’s existing security solutions to help users build and automate workflows, simplifying the incident response process and reducing the amount of human intervention necessary to handle security incidents. Companies use these tools to create a centralized system complete with visibility into a company’s security software and operational processes. These tools also reduce the time it takes to respond to incidents, as well as the potential for human error in remediating security threats and vulnerabilities.
SOAR platforms combine aspects of vulnerability management, incident response, and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions. SOAR products are designed to provide some of each tool’s respective functionality or integrate with third-party tools. Once integrated, processes can be designed to identify incidents and automate remediation tasks.
To qualify for inclusion in the Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) category, a product must:
Best Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Software At A Glance
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PhishER Plus is a FedRAMP Moderate certified, lightweight Incident Response and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) product designed to help organizations manage email threats that
16,190 Twitter followers
Torq is transforming cybersecurity with its AI-first enterprise-grade hyperautomation platform. By connecting the entire security infrastructure stack, Torq empowers organizations to instantly and pre
1,929 Twitter followers
n8n is a workflow automation platform that uniquely combines AI capabilities with business process automation. Built for technical teams, it offers 400+ integrations, custom code flexibility, and self
77,656 Twitter followers
Tines is the intelligent workflow platform trusted by the world's most advanced organizations. Companies like Coinbase, Databricks, Mars, Reddit, and SAP use Tines to power their most important workfl
Microsoft Sentinel lets you see and stop threats before they cause harm, with SIEM reinvented for a modern world. Microsoft Sentinel is your birds-eye view across the enterprise. Put the cloud and lar
13,088,482 Twitter followers
ServiceNow Security Operations is a sophisticated software solution designed to enhance threat and vulnerability management as well as incident response for organizations. By leveraging artificial int
53,697 Twitter followers
Chronicle’s cloud-native security, orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) product empowers security teams to respond to cyber threats in minutes - not hours or days. Chronicle SOAR fuses a uniq
31,775,247 Twitter followers
No email defense technology can protect against increasingly advanced email threats 100 percent of the time. Some advanced social engineering attacks like business email compromise will reach users’ m
15,260 Twitter followers
Check Point Infinity is the only fully consolidated cyber security architecture that provides unprecedented protection against Gen V mega-cyber attacks as well as future cyber threats across all netwo
71,026 Twitter followers
Palo Alto Networks' Cortex XSOAR is a comprehensive Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platform designed to streamline and enhance security operations. By integrating automation,
128,280 Twitter followers
Proofpoint Threat Response takes the manual labor and guesswork out of incident response to help you resolve threats faster and more efficiently.
31,106 Twitter followers
Product Description: Palo Alto Networks' Cortex XSIAM is an AI-driven security operations platform designed to transform traditional Security Operations Centers by integrating and automating key func
128,280 Twitter followers
Splunk SOAR provides security orchestration, automation and response capabilities that allow security analysts to work smarter by automating repetitive tasks; respond to security incidents faster with
721,498 Twitter followers
Sumo Logic, Inc. unifies and analyzes enterprise data, translating it into actionable insights through one AI-powered cloud-native log analytics platform. This single source of truth enables Dev, Sec
6,500 Twitter followers
Automate Everything Security in the Blink of AI Blink is a security workflow automation platform designed to make building, collaborating, and scaling all things security & beyond effortless us
686 Twitter followers
Learn More About Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Software
What is Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Software?
Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) software helps coordinate, execute, and automate tasks between various IT workers and tools. SOAR tools allow organizations to respond quickly to cybersecurity attacks and observe, understand, and prevent future incidents.
SOAR software gives organizations a comprehensive view of their existing security systems while centralizing the security data. By automating security responses and reducing manual tasks, SOAR helps to generate a faster and more accurate response to security attacks. It also helps better coordinate and route incident response to the most appropriate IT worker in real time.
What Does SOAR Stand For?
SOAR stands for security orchestration, automation, and response. SOAR software significantly contributes to identifying potential future security threats.
What are the Common Features of Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Software?
Usually, a SOAR software offering operates under three primary software capabilities:
Threat and vulnerability management: Threat and vulnerability management examines key assets and prioritizes efforts to reduce risk. Working with other security teams, threat and vulnerability management helps prevent attacks by threat actors.
Security incident response: Security incident response addresses and manages the aftermath of a security breach, cyberattack, computer incident, or security incident. Security incident response is to handle the aftermath of a security breach in a way that limits damage, reduces recovery time, and reduces cost.
Security operations automation: Security operations automation is the technology that enables the automation and orchestration of security tasks. This can include both administrative duties and incident detection and response.
What are the Benefits of Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Software?
The benefits of using a SOAR tool are that it lessens the impact of security incidents and reduces the risk of legal liability. SOAR software helps companies’ security teams by enabling them to:
Maintain a central view: One of the benefits of SOAR software is that it gives security staff a central view and enables control of existing security systems while centralizing data collection to improve a company's security posture, operational efficiency, and productivity.
Automate manual tasks: As with most software today, users are looking for help in terms of automation. SOAR software helps to manage and automate all aspects of a security incident lifecycle. This removes manual tasks, gives security staff more time to be productive, and allows them to focus on more mission-critical security tasks that do not require manual tasks.
Define incident and response procedures: SOAR software helps security systems define incident and response procedures. This helps to route security incidents to the correct security staff. SOAR can also prioritize and standardize the security response processes in a consistent, transparent, and documented way.
Optimize incident response: Because SOAR software helps security staff define incident and response procedures, incident response is more accurate. This accuracy enables security systems and staff to have improved responses where they may have to contain, eradicate, or recover crucial data.
Identify and assign incident severity levels: SOAR software helps to identify and assign incident severity levels. Severity levels in cybersecurity measure how severely a security incident impacts various parts of the organization. SOAR software automatically identifies and assigns severity levels, enabling the right security system and staff to respond appropriately. This means both can respond immediately to security incidents that may negatively affect an organization, such as networks, software, employee or customer data, etc.
Support collaboration and unstructured investigations: SOAR software supports collaboration and unstructured investigations in real time, helping route each security incident to the security system and security staff best suited to respond. Collaboration with other IT teams for tasks such as remediation or other departments such as legal is possible.
Streamline operations: By using SOAR software, organizations can streamline security operations for threat and vulnerability management, security incident response, and security operations automation. SOAR software connects these security elements while integrating disparate security systems. SOAR software’s playbooks allow users to orchestrate, streamline and automate tasks. Playbooks also codify the process workflows that streamline the SOAR software functions.
Who Uses Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Software?
IT and cybersecurity staff: They use SOAR software to handle security alerts such as phishing, which includes looking for threat feed data from endpoints, failed user logins, logins from unusual locations, malicious VPN access attempts, and so on. It's also used to hunt for threats and respond to incidents from attached files for malware analysis, cloud-aware incident response, and automate data enrichment. Cybersecurity staff who assign incident severity and check other products for vulnerability scores also use SOAR platforms.
Challenges with Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) software
There are a number of challenges with SOAR software that IT teams can encounter.
Skill gaps: While there is the misconception that SOAR software could replace security staff, the tool is meant to augment security teams, allowing them to work efficiently and effectively but not replacing them. However, there still may be a skills gap as the security team must be able to create detailed workflows of their processes.
Effective deployment: Another challenge of SOAR software is that it must be deployed to the enterprise but also connected to the other applications and technologies, which can be very complicated. An organization must also have staff with enough skills to deploy and maintain the platform. The applications and technologies used by the enterprise must also be able to support or be integrated into the SOAR software. One of SOAR software’s greatest strengths is to connect and orchestrate other technologies; however, if each technology is unable to be integrated, it hampers the benefits of deploying SOAR software.
How to Buy Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Software
If an organization is just starting out and looking to purchase SOAR software, g2.com can help select the best one.
Most business pain points might be related to all of the manual work that must be completed. If the company is large and has a lot of networks, data, or devices in its organization, they may need to shop for a SOAR software that can grow with its organization. Users should think about the pain points in security to help create a checklist of criteria. Additionally, the buyer must determine the number of employees who will need to use the SOAR software and if they currently have the skills to administer it.
Taking a holistic overview of the business and identifying pain points can help the team springboard into creating a checklist of criteria. The checklist serves as a detailed guide that includes both necessary and nice-to-have features, including budget, features, number of users, integrations, security staff skills, cloud or on-premises solutions, and more.
Depending on the scope of the deployment, it might be helpful to produce an RFI, a one-page list with a few bullet points describing what is needed from SOAR software.
Compare Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Software
Create a long list
Vendor evaluations are an essential part of the software buying process from meeting the business functionality needs to implementation. For ease of comparison, after all demos are complete, it helps to prepare a consistent list of questions regarding specific needs and concerns to ask each vendor.
Create a short list
From the long list of vendors, it is helpful to narrow down the list of vendors and come up with a shorter list of contenders, preferably no more than three to five. With this list in hand, businesses can produce a matrix to compare the features and pricing of the various solutions.
Conduct demos
To ensure the comparison is comprehensive, the user should demo each solution on the shortlist with the same use cases. This will allow the business to evaluate like for like and see how each vendor stacks up against the competition.
Selection of Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Software
Choose a selection team
Before getting started, creating a winning team that will work together throughout the entire process, from identifying pain points to implementation, is crucial. The software selection team should consist of organization members with the right interest, skills, and time to participate in this process. A good starting point is to aim for three to five people who fill roles such as the main decision maker, project manager, process owner, system owner, or staffing subject matter expert, as well as a technical lead, head administrator, or security administrator. In smaller companies, the vendor selection team may be smaller, with fewer participants multitasking and taking on more responsibilities.
Compare notes
The selection team should compare notes and facts and figures which they noted during the process, such as costs, security capabilities, and alert and incident response times.
Negotiation
Just because something is written on a company’s pricing page does not mean it's final. It is crucial to open up a conversation regarding pricing and licensing. For example, the vendor may be willing to give a discount for multi-year contracts or for recommending the product to others.
Final decision
After this stage, and before going all in, it is recommended to roll out a test run or pilot program to test adoption with a small sample size of users. If the tool is well used and well received, the buyer can be confident that the selection was correct. If not, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.
What does Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Software cost?
SOAR is considered a long-term investment. This means there must be a careful evaluation of vendors, and the software should be tailored to each organization's specific requirements. Once a SOAR solution is purchased, deployed, and integrated into an organization’s security system, the cost could be high, which is why the evaluation stage of selecting SOAR software is so crucial. The notion of rip-and-replace cost can be high. The SOAR vendor chosen should continue to provide support for the SOAR solution with flexibility and open integration.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Organizations decide to purchase SOAR software with some type of return on investment (ROI). As they want to recoup the money spent on the software, it is critical to understand the costs that will be saved in terms of efficiency.
SOAR software saves security staff costs by eliminating manual tasks. For example, SOAR software automatically investigates the scenario of email phishing attacks which is very common, so this task can be very repetitive and consumes security staff time if it is done manually. A large enterprise used actual data from its SOAR software deployment and compared it to the cost of handling email phishing investigations automatically using SOAR software versus handling them manually. The enterprise found that the reduction in staff time required to handle phishing emails equated to savings of over $680,000 per year.
Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Software Trends
Enterprises: Due to the requirements to maintain such large-scale IT and network infrastructure, organizations such as large enterprises tend to be more interested in purchasing SOAR software. Having such large networks and more complex IT makes such organizations more vulnerable to security threats which is another drive to purchase SOAR software. Also, larger organizations have more employees with more devices, which increases threats if they are accessing workplace applications on these devices.
Retail and e-commerce: These industries have increased interest in SOAR software due to the vulnerabilities in PoS)transactions and online purchases. It is the processing of these monetary transactions which creates a security risk, especially there personal and financial information of customers. Adopting technologies such as location-based marketing for these types of purchases also makes the retail industry more vulnerable to security threats.
