SOAR vs SIEM – What’s the Difference ? (Pros and Cons). In this blog, we discuss the differences between SOAR vs SIEM tools. So that you can choose the appropriate one according to your organization’s needs.
Cloud security is the combination of tools and procedures that defends against unauthorized data exposures. Significantly, they secure data, applications, and infrastructure throughout the cloud environment and maintain data integrity. However, the R&D team constantly concerns about cloud security.
In effect, to help them achieve their goals, they introduced more and more methodologies. Soon after, various tools are also created to put these methodologies into practice. Among these tools, the widely popular ones are SOAR and SIEM.
So, shall we start with SOAR vs SIEM – What’s the Difference ? (Pros and Cons).
What is SOAR?
Security Orchestration Automation and Response, or SOAR, is precisely the latest security operations and incident response approach. In essence, the tool enhances security operations’ efficiency, velocity, stability, and availability. In fact, it also integrates every tool and application within an organization’s security quiver. This way, a security team automates incident response workflows and reduce the time from breach discovery to resolution.
Features of SOAR
The features of SOAR are as follows:
Prioritization And Automation
In general, security tools generate many alerts that need to be prioritized. Subsequently, SOAR solutions automatically classify and respond to alarms to prevent alarm fatigue and increase productivity. In addition to alerts, SOAR solutions automate other repetitive and unstaffed security tasks that require attention.
Threat Intelligence
SOAR solutions automatically collect and validate data from various sources, including SIEM, and user behavior and entity analytics (UEBA) tools. Surely it helps build information based SOCs by providing the context for informed decision making and accelerating detection and response.
Visual Playbook Builder
SOAR solutions allow teams to work in innovative, automated workflows that integrate easily with existing tools. In general, teams convert playbooks into digital playbooks and automate these tasks.
Pros of SOAR
SOAR has three pillars: orchestration, automation, and response. These pillars address different challenges. Together, it provides solutions for the automation and orchestration of tasks necessary for incident response and management.
Orchestration
Surely, SOAR tool collects and centralizes events data to access all necessary information and responds to an incident in one place. Thus, the orchestration abilities enable all the technologies required to respond to a security incident to work together and seamlessly. The tool initiates a predefined workflow to deliver a solution and inform all stakeholders of an incident and its status.
Automation
Undeniably, SOAR’s automation pillar is the actual execution of the predefined processes that involve less human interaction. Also, it collects information from every active event and executes the most appropriate response steps such as, playbooks and runbooks. This way, they address attack vectors and threats.
Response
The Response pillar constitutes all the security activities, operations, and processes involved in corroborating a security incident. It includes both automatic and manual processes. You can differentiate response into business related functions, security hardening activities, infrastructure collaboration, and collaboration and notification steps.
Cons of SOAR
- Very complex. It limits who can take advantage of SOAR.
- SOAR integrations require technical expertise to implement.
- Since SOAR caters primarily to security experts, they cannot enforce a security centric across the organization.
Up next with SOAR vs SIEM – What’s the Difference ? is to learn SIEM.
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What is SIEM?
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SIEM, or Security Information or Event Management, is a tool that usually delivers two crucial outcomes: reports and alerts. Reports aggregate and display security related incidents and events, including malicious activities and failed login attempts. While, alerts notify whenever a tool’s analysis engine detects activities that violate the ruleset, consequently signaling security issues.
Features of SIEM
The features of SIEM are:
- Robust compliance reporting capability.
- You can effortlessly integrate SIEM with other enterprise security controls.
- SIEM systems can ingest threat intelligence data that indicates which IP addresses, websites, domains, etc., are associated with malicious behavior.
- It captures additional information about security events.
Pros of SIEM
Improves Response Time
SIEM helps the DevOps and Security team to view application, infrastructure, and network log data in one interface. It accelerates security incident responses and allows IT and security teams to identify attacks and track the attacker’s footsteps through the network’s components. Central log data helps identify malicious hosts and those affected by an attack.
Audit and Compliance
Current industry standards require that all businesses can track and present incident information. Similarly, companies must take responsibility for all actions on their systems. The ability of SIEM tools to perform these tasks has made them an essential component of most organizations’ infrastructures. The tool uses aggregated and correlated data to draw a complete image of events in the system. It includes connections, users, IP addresses, and data flow.
Detection and Alert
SIEM tools typically come with automated mechanisms for generating reports of potential violations. These tools can automatically respond to attacks in progress and even stop them. For example, they can limit or disconnect potentially compromised hosts, minimizing the impact of a breach. Speed and efficiency are huge benefits when dealing with security incidents. SIEM tools enable teams to respond quickly to known incidents, minimizing a breach’s potential reputational and financial impact.
Cons of SIEM
- Takes a lot of time to implement.
- SIEM is very expensive.
- Requires technical expertise.
- They are arduous to manage or operate.
- It generates numerous false positives.
Time for comparison with SOAR vs SIEM – What’s the Difference ?
SOAR vs SIEM - Key Differences
The critical differences between SOAR vs SIEM are as follows:
Definition And Purpose
SIEM is a security tool that collects all the security data in the centre point and converts them into actionable intelligence. It also raises alerts whenever an abnormal activity occurs. On the other hand, SOAR is a security tool that aims at helping the security team to manage and swiftly respond to alerts. Therefore, it addresses the security data and workflow to implement in depth defense capabilities.
Quick And Efficient
The SIEM tool regularly monitors and tunes to understand and differentiate between abnormal activities. It generates less efficient alerts and even takes more time to make this tool work for them. On the contrary, SOAR takes no more time. It is, therefore, a fast and effective security tool that automatically responds to emerging threats, such as warnings or alerts that are quickly resolved and addressed with appropriate solutions to those threats. Therefore, SOAR is faster and more efficient than SIEM.
Human Resource Management
The SIEM tool requires more human resources management as your team needs time to make decisions to investigate suspicious activity. Therefore, whenever these activities occur, the SIEM resolution team needs more team members to make decisions and handle these alerts. On the contrary, SOAR does not require a lot of staff because these SOAR applications or solutions are automotive and orchestration. So alert generated are automatically resolved with fewer team members, and SOAR takes less time than SOAR to determine those alerts.
SOAR vs SIEM - Quick Comparision
- SIEM detects security incidents and triggers alerts. It provides a broad spectrum of capabilities that do not create unified processes and technologies. On the other hand, SOAR responds to such alerts more efficiently and quickly. It takes remediation steps wherever necessary.
- Using the SIEM tool, analysts can acquire alerts of unwanted events and activities. It helps them to decide if further investigation is required or not. In SOAR, a warning occurs when it detects auspicious events or activities. In this situation, it automatically invokes investigation path workflows and even reduces the time for resolving such alerts.
- SIEM is the oldest security tool compared to SOAR. Hence, it combines all the security data but the location and quantity of the information.
Also Read Deploy Active Directory Reporting Tool
SIEM vs SOAR
- SIEM requires more human resources to manage rules and use cases to handle the difficulty. For this purpose, they need to hire more staff or teams. However, in SOAR, the focus is more on orchestration and automation. This reduces the time human resources take to complete the tasks.
- SIEM aggregates security data from multiple resources. They acquire different event data and logs from various component sources. SOAR also collects security data from many other sources, all of which take data that can import data from endpoint security software as third party or third party sources.
- SIEM stores and collects the entire data in a centralized location like IPS, firewalls, DLP tools, etc. SOAR collects and stores security data from external apps and other resources, including SSL certificate chain data.
- SIEM solutions generate more alerts and take longer to respond to alerts than SOAR. On the other hand, SOAR also generates alerts, but these alerts are resolved in a short time, which makes processing alerts faster and more efficient than SIEM solutions.
Thank you for reading SOAR vs SIEM – What’s the Difference ? (Pros and Cons). We shall conclude.
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SOAR vs SIEM - What's the Difference ? (Pros and Cons) Conclusion
Therefore, saying which tool is superior and understanding the critical differences between SOAR and SIEM is challenging. SOAR and SIEM share some standard components, but the cybersecurity industry or security team members need to understand their differences, as you cannot use them interchangeably.
