In a SOC environment, as threats grow more complex and advanced, SOC teams face challenges like alert fatigue, manual processes, too many disconnected tools, and difficulties in communication across teams. This is where Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) steps in to trying to overcome these challenges for a SOC team.

SOAR: Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response. It is a tool that integrates all the security tools used in a SOC. Using SOAR, SOC analysts do not need to switch between SIEM, EDR, Firewall, and other security tools during their investigations. All these tools can be operated using a single SOAR interface.

SOAR has three main capabilities like its name states:

• Orchestration: While investigating an alert, a SOC analyst has to switch between multiple security tools for the analysis. Manual switching between different tools slows down the investigation process. Orchestration solves this problem by coordinating all used tools together inside the SOAR. It connects different tools from various vendors within the unified SOAR interface. It also defines workflows for investigating various types of alerts (Playbooks). These playbooks are predefined steps that tell the SOAR how to investigate a specific alert. playbooks are dynamic and usually contain different paths. The result of each step determines the next action.
• Automation: Orchestration and applying predefined actions through playbooks, can be automated. Automation means SOAR will itself follow the playbooks without the interference of the SOC analyst. This saves a huge amount of time for SOC analysts. They can handle hundreds of alerts without burning out.
• Response: SOAR gives the ability to take actions using different tools from one unified interface and the response can also be automated.

With SOAR, there is no more alert fatigue, most of the processes are automated, and all the different tools are connected for coordination.

SOAR also provides ticketing and case management features to the SOC analysts. These features provide the following capabilities:

• Accountability: who is assigned to the incident
• Traceability : Full investigation timeline
• Standardization: playbooks & Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• Compliance & auditing: Following standards like: ISO 27001, SOC 2, etc.
• Knowledge retention: Lessons learned from the incident.

Do we still Need SOC analysts?

• A SOAR tool can automate the majority of repetitive tasks, but it still can't handle complex investigations, so a SOC analyst is still required, but SOAR cannot give a judgment call at some critical points that an analyst can.
• A SOC analyst understands the threats in the broader business context. A SOC analyst also makes the playbooks for different types of alerts
• So, the SOAR would ease the burden of SOC by automating repetitive tasks and organizing everything in a simplified structure, but SOC analysts are still needed.