What is Security Orchestration
Security orchestration is the first of the SOAR cybersecurity acronym. Gartner introduced the SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) concept as a stack of compatible software solutions and tools that allow organizations to facilitate and automate security processes in these three areas:
- Threat and vulnerability management
- Incident response
- Security operations automation
Security orchestration, specifically, refers to a process of connecting security tools and integrating various loose ends of a security system into one tightly knit platform. It is a connection method that consolidates security functions and data collection, and it ultimately powers the next stage of SOAR: security automation.
How can SOAR help your organization?
By using a SOAR platform, your business can absorb input data from internal and external sources, process that data into actionable strategies, create workflows to respond to incidents throughout the incident lifecycle, address security gaps, and automate alert responses. SOAR empowers the security team by automating and integrating a complex stack of digital technology and processes and requires the intervention of human team players only at the point when their intervention is needed.
A SOAR Platform Will Improve Security By:
- Connecting security orchestration, automaton, incident response management, and forensic investigations into a unified platform
- Cutting out redundant tasks and siloed processes by streamlining workflows and enabling intelligent automation for analysis of cyber incidents and the response process
- Providing a centralized window to visualize and manage all aspects of the security stack
- Improving case management by walking through a cyber incident from the detection stage through the response phase.
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How Does Security Orchestration Work?
To understand how security orchestration works, we will use an example of a suspicious email with a clickable link that an employee receives. An alert employee will report the suspicious link to the SOC as a potential phishing email. The SOC analysts will check the veracity of the link and determine if it’s malicious or a false alarm. This process can be done manually for a limited number of alerts, but in larger companies that deal with thousands of emails a day in addition to other threats, manual investigations become impossible and garner an unwanted condition, called “alert fatigue”. Instead, processes can be automated through various digital solutions and tools that detect suspicious emails, test the URL reputation of the link, and download and run the suspicious file in a sandboxed environment. When all these processes work automatically behind the scenes and are all in sync with each other, this is called security orchestration.
Security orchestration coordinates the sequence of a security plan, including incident identification, analysis, response, and ultimately recovery. It ensures that all security and non-security tools are synced, whether automating vulnerability scanning and reporting processes or alerting the IT department of flagged incidents that need human attention.
Ultimately, security orchestration increases the integration of your security defense system, allowing your team to maximize the value of your staff, processes, and tools.
Benefits of Security Orchestration
Streamlining Security Operations
Managing a complex stack of digital security tools can challenge any IT team. With security orchestration, disparate tools are connected and repetitive processes are automated.
Targeted Response to Data Breaches
A security orchestration tool routinely collects and analyzes data from different contexts and sources, enabling the detection of a breach quickly and accurately. It will also trigger a logical response in case of breach and aggregate data to find suspicious patterns and behaviors.
Efficient Investigations
Orchestration enables more relevant investigations. Security analysts can stop managing thousands of minor or false alerts and start investigating why real security incidents are occurring.
Improve Collaboration
When several departments need to get involved in responding to a security incident, orchestration presents all the necessary information in a centralized, visual format, making a response and decision-making more efficient.
Which Tools Does Security Orchestration Connect?
- Vulnerability scanners
- Endpoint protection products
- End-user behavior analytics
- Firewalls
- Intrusion detection systems (IDS)
- Intrusion prevention systems (IPS)
- (SIEM) platforms
- External threat intelligence feeds.
- Antivirus software
SOAR vs. SIEM
SOAR is a more comprehensive aggregation solution than traditional SIEMs. Whereas the latter collects information from logs and events generated by the organization’s infrastructure, SOAR gathers information from many more sources. SOAR helps unify the security response more holistically.
Secondly, whereas SIEM systems generate an alert to respond to a potential event, SOAR platforms use automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to actually respond to those threats. Many companies use SOAR services to supplement existing SIEM software, and some SIEM vendors even offer SOAR features in their SIEM products.
Automate and Orchestrate Cyber Risk Management with Centraleyes
Leveraging the power of automation and orchestration, the Centraleyes cloud-based platform can be described as “GRC done right”. Learn about our reimagined GRC platform where you can:
- automate your cyber risk management and compliance tasks to save valuable time and resources
- collect data with pre-loaded smart questionnaires, automated workflows, and fast data aggregation
- generate amazing reports with the most relevant data that will help you make smarter strategic decisions with the click of a button
Start Getting Value With
Centraleyes for Free
See for yourself how the Centraleyes platform exceeds anything an old GRC
system does and eliminates the need for manual processes and spreadsheets
to give you immediate value and run a full risk assessment in less than 30 days
