What is SOAR?
SOAR stands for Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response. It refers to platforms that help security teams connect their many separate tools, automate repetitive tasks, and coordinate their response to incidents from one place. The term was coined by Gartner in 2015, and it brings together three capabilities that used to live in separate products: incident response, orchestration and automation, and threat intelligence management.
What do the three parts mean?
- Orchestration: Connects disparate tools such as SIEM, EDR, firewalls, ticketing systems, and threat intelligence feeds so they can work together.
- Automation: Carries out predefined tasks without human intervention, executing a set sequence of steps automatically.
- Response: Lets the team neutralize a threat through automated actions, guided steps for an analyst, or a mix of both.
How does SOAR work in practice?
- Playbooks: Predefined workflows codify how to handle a given scenario, so the same steps run consistently every time.
- Common automated steps: Enriching an alert with threat intelligence, looking up indicators of compromise, opening a ticket, quarantining a phishing email, or isolating a compromised device.
- Typical use cases: Phishing response, alert triage, ransomware containment, and insider-threat investigation are among the most common starting points.
Why do security teams use SOAR?
- Less manual work: Automating routine tasks frees analysts to focus on complex, higher-value problems and helps reduce burnout.
- Faster response: By streamlining triage and coordinating tools, SOAR helps lower mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR).
- More consistency: Codified playbooks mean incidents are handled the same reliable way regardless of who is on shift.
How does SOAR relate to SIEM and the SOC?
- Paired with SIEM: A SIEM collects and analyzes data to detect threats, while SOAR acts on those findings with automated follow-up. Modern SOCs commonly feed SIEM alerts into SOAR playbooks for triage and containment.
- Lives in the SOC: SOAR is typically used within a security operations center to make the whole detection-to-response process faster and more coordinated, which is why MDR providers often rely on it to scale their service.
