These days, searching for a top security orchestration automation and response (SOAR) platform can be overwhelming. Especially if you do not know what to look for. When you choose a top SOAR platform, your SOC has to have a certain level of maturity to be able to take full advantage its capabilities. A SOAR platform, combined with new-age technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), can help organizations enable automation to mitigate threats faster.
A top SOAR platform should provide your organization with a solution that fits your cybersecurity approach, framework, and infrastructure. It needs to be compatible with all of your existing security solutions. Also, it must deliver the use cases your organization needs to complement your set of existing security products in order to manage the SOC and your security operations functions. Lastly, when choosing a SOAR platform, the decision must be driven by your existing security processes like threat monitoring and response, threat investigation and hunting, threat intelligence management, responding to phishing emails, etc.
A top SOAR platform should have the following qualities:
- Integrate seamlessly with your existing cybersecurity interface - With enterprise security operations teams using an average of more than 10 tools to maintain their security framework, the SOAR you choose should integrate efficiently with your existing cybersecurity program.
- Offer the capability to easily code an organization’s existing playbooks (using a low- or no-code model) that the tool can then automate, via an intuitive UI.
- Collaboration tools for analysts (using chat or IM framework) to enable more efficient communication.
- A pricing model that is aligned with your organization’s needs. Avoid pricing structures based on the volume of data managed by the tool or based on the number of playbooks run per month.
- Flexibility in the deployment and hosting of the solution — either in the cloud, on-premises or a hybrid.
- Manual and automated actions can be taken simultaneously - Alert fatigue is a real thing for cybersecurity professionals. With a SOAR, teams can automate tedious processes and let security experts concentrate their skills on the more high-level tasks that require human intervention. A top SOAR platform should allow both human and automated actions simultaneously.
- Tracking and reporting features – A key to a top SOAR platform is its dashboard and reporting capabilities. They need to provide the ability to aggregate SOC data that is easily understandable of the SOC’s situation, incident response processes, and performance results. Dashboards that can be presented to different audiences, such as SOC manager, SOC analyst and CISO are also key.