SOAR Vs. SIEM

SOAR Vs. SIEM? What’s The Difference?

What is SOAR?

A lot of attention is being paid to the SOAR vs. SIEM debate. Although terms and acronyms can get convoluted in the ever-growing security marketplace, SIEM Security aren’t the same things. To get the most benefit from the security data, it is essential to understand the difference between these cybersecurity tools. SOAR and SIEM have various components in common, but enterprises can’t use these tools interchangeably as they are different.

The article will discuss the introduction of SIEM, and SOAR, some critical differences between them, how both can collectively provide multilayer cybersecurity to the organization seamlessly.

What is SIEM?

SIEM or Security Information and Event Management is a tool that provides two primary outcomes: reports and alerts. The report aggregates and displays security-related incidents and events- malicious activities or failed login attempts. An alert trigger when the tool analysis engine detects any violation against the set rule in the SIEM tool, signaling a security issue.

One of the most significant benefits of SIEM tools is improved identification and response time through data aggregation and normalization. They also speed up threat detection, security alerting, and meeting compliance requirements.

What is SOAR?

SOAR is an acronym for Security Orchestration Automation and Response. It is a new approach to security operations and incident response that improves security activities’ efficiency, rapidity, availability, and stability. SOAR tools combine all of an organization’s existing security tools and applications, allowing the security team to automate incident response workflows and shorten the time between breach discovery and resolution.

Orchestration, automation, and reaction are the three pillars of SOAR. Each pillar addresses different challenges that SecOps teams have, and together, SOAR tools provide a complete solution for the automation and orchestration of incident response and management tasks.

SIEM Vs. SOAR

1. Core Functions and Capabilities

Data storage, threat intelligence, and analysis are the critical functions of SIEM solutions. They use data aggregation, threat detection, identification, and alert simultaneously, and these aren’t commonly automated operations because they result in repetitive duties. SIEM solutions only send out alerts when they detect suspicious activity, and security analysts then manually act to determine whether further investigation is necessary to declare the event as an incident.

On the other hand, SOAR tools automate the entire investigation process. They can certify an event as a security incident or non-security event.

2. Human Intervention

One of the primary differences between SIEM and SOAR is the amount of human intervention required to operate each tool type. As the security teams need to maximize their value, SIEM tools require constant fine-tuning and development. Although SIEM tools are created to save time and effort, they often consume more time. These tools also require a designated team to manage and maintain rules, used cases to distinguish between real and false alerts. As a result, many SIEM administrators claim that the tools provide value; however, they invest increasing amounts of time and resources to see some actual results.

In contrast, SOAR tools can help reduce human intervention due to their automation feature as their primary object. As SOAR tools automatically filter out false positives, they generate fewer alerts, allowing security analysts to focus more on improving and automating incident response plans.

3. Source of Data

Both SIEM and SOAR use the same data: logs and events from all application and network components. However, they acquire data from a wide range of sources, and the amount of data they collect varies greatly.

SIEM products often collect logs and event data from hosts and infrastructure sources such as firewalls, data loss prevention tools, and malware detection and prevention systems. SOAR tools work uniquely. To capture more significant amounts and types of data, they can combine various sources (including external applications).

Since SOAR is based on an automation philosophy, these tools have better knowledge about actions and configurations in the network to identify anomalies.

Should you use SIEM and SOAR together?

According to the security professional, SIEM and SOAR can work together to provide a collective defense against cyber attacks and threats. Gartner predicts that 15% of businesses with a security team larger than five people will leverage SOAR by the end of 2020. SOAR has the potential to improve the efficacy and efficiency of Security Operations; therefore, the platform plays an essential role in shaping the SIEM’s future.

SIEM raises alerts when malicious activity is found and notifies security administrators to respond to the alert or trigger an automated response. However, SIEM’s response capabilities go to the next level with the SOAR solution by offering an automated response. After receiving the alert from SIEM, a SOAR solution issues a call to generate a ticket in the incident tracking system. After that, it reaches into the emergency alerting system to inform the CSIRT team while implementing quarantine rules automatically in a firewall.

Thus, SOAR tools serve as a cybersecurity accelerator by saving response time. Combining these tools saves time and resources and provides faster, more innovative detection and response and remediation of cyber incidents.

Conclusion

Although both SIEM and SOAR provide security teams with solutions to their problems, they can complement each other. Having a SOAR tool makes SIEM solutions more efficient, and together they produce more reliable and meaningful alerts that security teams can effectively respond to. The integration of SIEM tools with SOAR tools combines the power of each to create a more robust, efficient, and responsive security solution.

With numerous out-of-the-box connectors and easy-to-configure playbooks, LTS Secure SOAR can easily be integrated with all major security solutions, providing a single centralized point of visibility with advanced case management capabilities, asset correlation view, and automated response for security incidents.

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