SIEM vs. SOAR: A Comparative Analysis

SIEM or Security Information and Event Management is a system for identifying and escalating security incidents taking place anywhere across a network. SIEM collects data from various sources and correlates them to recognize patterns that indicate anomalies. SOAR or Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response plays a role that is complementary to that of SIEM. It automates incident response after an alert is raised.

In this article, we will conduct a detailed SIEM vs SOAR comparison, understanding the key differences between the two in terms of functionality, use cases, and importance. We will also explore how the SIEM and SOAR systems can work in tandem to build a strong cyber defense framework.

What is Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)?

SIEM is a security solution that combines security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) to create granular visibility into an organization’s software systems.

SIEM is capable of collecting event log data from a wide range of sources and crunching it to detect and analyze anomalies in real time and trigger appropriate action. SIEM collects vast amounts of security information and event data servers, firewalls, applications, etc.

It then conducts data analysis using complex algorithms and correlation rules to identify deviations from usual patterns that indicate security threats. Once a threat is detected, the SIEM system raises an alert so the security team can respond quickly.

What are the key features of SIEM?

The Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions work like a security watchtower with the primary function of early detection of potential security threats. The key features of SIEM highlight this very function.

• Log management – An SIEM system brings security log data from different sources into a centralized location to organize and analyze it to find patterns that indicate a probable threat or breach.
• Event correlation – The event data is sorted and correlated to find patterns that may appear from seemingly unrelated events.
• Incident monitoring and response – SIEM monitors network data for security incidents and raises timely alerts during an event.
• Reporting – By generating detailed reports of every security incident, SIEM creates streamlined audit trails that might help in maintaining compliance.

What is Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR)?

SOAR is a set of services that coordinates and automates threat prevention and incident response. It has three primary components: orchestration, automation, and incident response.

Orchestration refers to establishing connections between internal and external security tools including out-of-the-box tools and custom integrations. It allows organizations to deal with their growing inventory of security tools and third-party integrations.

Automation sets up playbooks and workflows that are triggered by an incident or a rule. This can be used to manage alerts and set up responsive actions. While it is extremely difficult to employ end-to-end security automation, with a little human intervention, a lot of tasks can be automated.

The first two components lay the foundation for rapid incident response.

What are the key features of SOAR?

The global mean time to detect (MTTD) a security breach is around 200 days and the mean time to recover (MTTR) is around 40 days. The primary goal of the SOAR technology is to reduce both MTTD and MTTR which in turn can reduce the overall impact of an attack on a business. The key features of SOAR are tuned towards this goal.

• Integration and prioritization of security alerts – A SOAR system integrates information from disparate security tools into a central console and ensures that security alerts from all such sources are successfully triaged and prioritized.
• Automation – Routine tasks such as incident triage and playbook execution are automated to a great extent. It frees up resources and reduces the pressure on security professionals by leveraging AI.
• Case management – Case management is a feature that creates a centralized hub for information related to all security incidents from their inception till they are closed.
• Playbook Automation – This refers to setting up a step-by-step workflow for the common tasks to be performed during the incident response procedure. This reduces both response time and the likelihood of human error.
• Threat Intelligence Integration – Streamlines the correlation of threat intelligence data with incident data to prioritize critical threats and suggest response actions.

Critical Differences Between SIEM and SOAR

SIEM and SOAR play complementary roles in cybersecurity. SIEM is good for finding threat indications by analyzing security event data from across an organization’s infrastructure, whereas SOAR is more action-oriented. It focuses on responding to security alerts and triggering remedial action.

Both are responsible for detecting threats and mounting responses; the scale at which they work, the sources used by the tools, and the overall impact are the distinguishing factors. In this section, we’ll discuss those factors.

#1 SIEM vs SOAR: Focus and primary function

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is the process of collecting security event data, correlating events, and recognizing patterns that indicate anomalous activity. It offers deep insights into an organization’s security posture.

The primary focus of Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms is on automating and orchestrating incident response processes. SOAR enables security teams to reduce response time to security incidents and threats.

#2 SIEM vs SOAR: Automation

SIEM uses automation for collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data as well as pattern recognition.

SOAR enables the automation of rule-based remedial actions to ensure rapid incident response.

#3 SIEM vs SOAR: Incident response

SIEM has limited incident response capabilities. As discussed earlier, its primary function is raising alerts, and it relies on security professionals to assess the threats and take necessary action.

SOAR plays a more hands-on role when it comes to incident response. It uses predefined playbooks to expedite remedial action based on security alerts collected from various tools.

#4 SIEM vs SOAR: Data collection

SIEM collects raw data from sources across the infrastructure including logs from firewalls, servers, network devices, and applications.

SOAR, unlike SIEM, doesn’t collect raw data. It focuses on collecting processed security data from SIEM and other security tools.

#5 SIEM vs SOAR: Outcome

SIEM is a technology focused on the detection of security incidents. It can raise security alerts with relevant insights for security professionals. As far as response and remediation is concerned, SIEM almost completely relies on knowledge workers.

SOAR is focused on automating incident response. Its main outcome is a reduction in both MTTD and MTTR.

#6 SIEM vs SOAR: Cost and scalability

SIEM requires a large up-front investment to fund the infrastructure required to process vast amounts of data. Ongoing costs may include licensing, storage, and hardware maintenance. Businesses may find it difficult and cost-intensive to scale the SIEM system as the enterprise grows.

SOAR systems often operate as Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) with subscription-based models. For instance, a business using SentinelOne’s AI-powered security automation platform doesn’t need to worry about building a robust security infrastructure from scratch. It reduces costs and makes scaling up easy.

SIEM vs SOAR: Key Differences

When to choose SIEM vs SOAR?

SIEM is suitable for an organization trying to build a robust, in-house security foundation that can analyze vast amounts of security data to identify potential threats. SOAR is more suitable for an organization with a mature security program that is trying to increase efficiency by automating various security tasks. So, how does a company make the right choice between SIEM vs SOAR?

The important thing to understand here is that SIEM and SOAR perform complementary tasks in an organization. SIEM works like a fire alarm while SOAR works like a firefighting unit – the former is good for continuous monitoring and threat detection and the latter for rapid response.

If a company has an SIEM that detects anomalous network behavior, every time it detects an anomaly—a sudden spike in data traffic, for instance—it raises an alarm for the security team. Now, the security leadership has to allocate someone to the specific issue to investigate and remediate.

But if it’s a false positive, the assignee would waste valuable time. When there are a lot of alerts coming through, it becomes imperative to avoid false positives, and automate routine tasks, or else, a company risks losing sight of the most critical issues. That’s where SOAR comes in.

SOAR can integrate data from multiple security systems, and run automations to investigate, prioritize, and remediate certain issues.

This ensures two things: 1. Incidents are looked at and attended to much faster. 2. Security professionals can focus on the issues that truly require expert attention, the rest is taken care of with logical playbooks.

A good way of looking at the SOAR vs SIEM comparison is to perceive the SOAR capabilities as an augmentation for SIEM.

Critical SIEM use cases

1. Centralized log management – SIEM collects log data from diverse sources such as servers, network devices, and applications and consolidates them into a single location. This unified view allows better security incident detection and investigation.
2. Forensic investigation – SIEM assists forensic investigations by helping security teams reconstruct the attack timeline, identify the attack vector, and gather evidence for legal or compliance purposes.
3. Threat detection – With advanced analytics and correlation techniques, SIEM identifies patterns indicative of anomalous activity. SIEM can detect threats such as malware, data breaches, and insider threats in real-time.
4. Compliance – SIEM helps organizations meet regulatory compliance standards by providing evidence of security controls and monitoring activities.

SOAR Use Cases

1. Automated incident response – Rapid execution of predefined playbooks ensures streamlined threat containment. Human error is reduced through automated actions. The incident handling processes are streamlined as the responses are based on established playbooks ensuring consistent actions across different incidents. The results of the playbook can be analyzed based on parameters such as success rate, execution time, resource utilization, etc. These analytics allow further optimization of the playbooks.
2. Orchestrating workflows – SOAR integrates toolchains to ensure seamless collaboration between tools. Through central task assignments and automated workflows, even a small security team or a single individual can manage many security incidents.
3. Enhance incident investigation – With centralized case management, SOAR platforms can store and manage incident data at a central console. Security data is analyzed to gather additional context. Collecting processed data from various sources ensures in-depth investigation.
4. Improved threat hunting and analytics – SOAR platforms can conduct proactive threat hunting, leveraging threat intelligence. Threat intelligence can help create customized playbooks for specific threat actors. This leads to an effective defense against various attack techniques, and overall improved hunting efforts.

Consolidating SIEM and SOAR for Better Security

Consolidating SIEM and SOAR can be a great strategic move for businesses trying to strengthen their security posture and scale their security operations. SIEM allows a unified view of the security landscape while SOAR enables streamlined incident response and increased efficiency through automation and AI usage. This consolidation allows security teams to detect threats faster and respond with better effect.

Key Benefits of Integrating SIEM and SOAR

1. Enhanced Threat Detection and Response – SOAR makes use of security alerts raised by SIEM and other security tools to enhance threat assessment and response.
2. Improved Security Operations Efficiency – The use of automation augments the capacity of security teams and frees up resources to focus on the most critical issues. The time saved by automated workflows leads to a reduced mean time to detection and recovery. SOAR frees up security professionals by automating routine tasks.
3. Increased Visibility and Control – SIEM offers granular visibility into an organization’s security landscape, while SOAR offers centralized control over incident response procedures.
4. Accelerated Incident Investigation – SOAR can add context to alerts raised by SIEM, enhancing the speed and quality of the investigation.
5. Enhanced Compliance – Both tools can assist in demonstrating compliance with industry regulations. For instance, SIEM correlates logs from various sources creating a comprehensive view of network activity which in turn can be helpful during a compliance audit.

Security admins can configure SOAR to perform routine compliance checks automatically. These may include the verification of firewall rules, password policies, or patch management status.

How to Choose the Right Tool for Your Organization?

You need a way of empowering your existing security framework with the speed and autonomy of artificial intelligence. Leaders must think beyond SIEM vs SOAR and embrace a consolidated approach that focuses on strengthening the SOC (Security Operations Center).

What to look for in a security solution?

• Scalability: The security tool should be able to handle an increasing amount of data and incidents as the business grows. Maintaining scalability with an in-house SIEM system is challenging. Partnering with a cloud-based platform that can easily manage growth is the ideal solution for most companies.
• Integration: Your security tool, especially SOAR, must integrate with existing security resources since a SOAR tool must pull security data in from all security tools like SIEM, and endpoint security units.

• Ease of use: Having an intuitive console or dashboard that lets you monitor and control activities across the security framework adds a lot of efficiency to security management. Especially, in the case of SOAR, you would want a platform that allows you to oversee the workflows and their performance.

• Threat intelligence: The security tool of your choice should be locked in with the threat intelligence feed. It helps your organization stay ahead in terms of coping with emerging threats.
• Cost and ROI: If you consider cost and ROI, an outsourced, consolidated platform approach makes the most sense. You can forego the initial investments of setting up the data infrastructure required for SIEM, you can also save the resources needed for building SOAR capabilities by choosing a platform like Singularity™ AI SIEM by SentinelOne.

You must choose a vendor with a proven track record, deep expertise, and a vision for the future. It serves you, in the long run, to partner with an organization that’s focused on meeting your current security needs but also making strides to defend against potential challenges of the future like more sophisticated malware attacks, high-quality phishing, more powerful DDoS attacks, and eventually, attacks powered by quantum computing.

Why You Should Choose SentinelOne?

The AI SIEM built on SentinelOne Singularity™ Data Lake is the perfect platform for organizations trying to build an autonomous SOC with granular visibility, rapid response, and efficient resource management.

SentinelOne can transform your legacy SIEM and enable a transition into the future with the power of artificial intelligence.

Here’s what you get:  

• AI-powered real-time visibility across your enterprise
• A cloud-native SIEM with limitless scalability and data retention
• Hyperautomation of your workflows instead of brittle SOAR
• A combination of enterprise-wide threat hunting with industry-leading threat intelligence
• A unified console experience

You can secure everything – endpoint, cloud, network, identity, email, and more. You can ingest first-party and third-party data from any source and in any format – structured or unstructured.

In the end, the goals you can achieve with AI SIEM by SentinelOne are:

• Faster threat detection and response
• Reduced false positives
• More efficient resource allocation
• An overall improved security posture.

That’s everything you want from your security platform and it also ends the SIEM vs SOAR debate by integrating SOAR capabilities into an AI-Powered SIEM.

Conclusion

With this article, we have built a high-level understanding of how SIEM and SOAR work. We have also discovered that the SIEM vs SOAR debate ends with a perfect consolidation of both of them in a platform like SentinelOne’s AI SIEM.

A combination of SIEM and SOAR creates the balance that an organization needs and with the mentioned use cases we hope that you have formed a vision for your organization based on your specific business needs.

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