Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response in The Cloud

Only a few years have passed since Gartner coined the term SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response), but now the world of security needs another shake-up. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, 26% of the world's organizations greatly expanded on their use of cloud technologies. While this overnight innovation was necessary to keep the world ticking over, it also invited many malicious actors to expose stressed and over-stretched IT departments.

To protect cloud environments against hackers, security orchestration, automation, and response technology need to make advances towards the world of cloud computing. Existing security teams cannot just patrol the safe perimeter of their organization anymore - security incidents can now happen almost anywhere.

Problems With Moving To The Cloud

Moving to the cloud brings problems - how do we weather the storm?

Although we have had the technology for decades, some businesses did not adopt cloud infrastructure until forced to by Covid-19. This rapid upheaval for IT teams meant that security operations had to quickly adapt to the new perimeters of their businesses.

This meant for most that:

Tried and tested tools and methods became less effective
Information security and data management became more difficult
Security analysts had to rapidly adapt security tools, including any SOAR platform that they were using
Detection and response became much more difficult throughout the distributed network

In truth, security professionals have to move even faster than before. Threats are constantly changing, reacting to changes in the way we work. As cloud infrastructure is rapidly spun up, rapid response, vulnerability management, and event management all need to become automatic to outpace the threats that organizations face every day.

The use cases of SOAR platforms became apparent to overworked security professionals, but how is a SOAR platform the answer to the vulnerabilities that come with cloud computing?

What SOAR Platforms Can Bring To Cloud Computing

SOAR platforms are powerful security tools that allow organizations without the means to build big security teams to carry out effective threat detection and incident response. By jumping into the world of security automation after cloud adoption, security teams can introduce successful SOAR solutions to stop threats before they even become threats.

Although a SOC may struggle to adapt to the expansive and exposed nature of cloud capabilities, integrating SOAR tools bring three key strengths to distributed environments. Early adopters such as SIRP and Rapid7 have already developed solutions to accelerate SOAR adoption in the cloud, but how do they aid organizations?

Unified Case Management

By introducing a SOAR platform, security operations become unified across the organization. Incidents are managed from a central location, meaning that case management is coordinated. This has many knock-on effects for the usefulness of a SOAR platform.

This brings three key strengths to those that adopt a SOAR platform in their cloud solution:

Reporting and managing issues becomes automated, along with alerts and responsive tasks.
Logging and auditing a threat is centralized, allowing for easier access to records.
Analysis of previous issues is easier as security analysts no longer have to focus on responding to thousands of individual alerts every day.

Business-Wide Integration

One of the strongest benefits of a SOAR platform is that it can be set up to allow a non-specialist to effectively follow a workflow. Orchestration of security processes and automation of defensive actions mean that SOAR tools can and should be integrated into all departments. Security becomes a collaboration between departments, not just the security team.

By moving incident response workflows into the wheelhouse of the entire organization, security operations become less concerned with responding to individual threats. Instead, security professionals do what they do best - identifying ways to harden systems, develop new incident identification and response tactics, and expand on the capabilities of the team through threat intelligence.

Unified Tools Wherever The Threat

An effective security team needs to handle threats in a unified way. When using a SOAR platform, the same incident response tools are used externally and internally. This allows security teams to easily manage entire organizations.

A centralized approach to security management means that "dashboard sprawl" is avoided - all security professionals will be able to manage any remote threat and respond with the appropriate solution after having learned how to use one tool.

How Will SOAR Platforms Change Cloud Security?

Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms are still in their juvenile phase. SOAR platform adoption is not yet widespread, but the unmanageably large size of multi-cloud solutions means that automated incident response tactics are the necessary next step for security teams.

Orchestration and automation of threats have made SOAR solutions attractive opportunities for both small-to-medium businesses and enterprise size organizations. Now, security professionals can focus on threat intelligence, remediation, and develop insights for strengthening.

SIRP’s no-code, risk-based SOAR platform accelerates SOAR adoption in the cloud. In addition, it also provides streamlined reporting, a world-class security scoring engine, and powerful case management and playbook modules. These capabilities empower organizations to optimize threat hunting, prioritize response at scale, and strengthen their security posture.

To learn more about SIRP, arrange a personalized demo.