SOAR vs SIEM – What’s the Difference ? (Pros and Cons)
SOAR vs SIEM – What’s the Difference ? (Pros and Cons). In this article we discuss the differences between the two security tools.
All in all, Cloud security is the combination of tools and procedures that defends against unauthorized data exposures. They secure data, applications, and infrastructure throughout the cloud environment and maintain data integrity. The concerns about cloud security is ever growing.
In order to help them achieve their goals, they introduced more and more methodologies. Various tools are also created to put these methodologies into practice. Among these tools, the widely popular ones are SOAR and SIEM. Both have capabilities that compliment each other but they are not the same thing.
So shall we start with SOAR vs SIEM – What’s the Difference ?
What is SOAR?
First of all, Security Orchestration Automation and Response, or SOAR, is precisely the latest security operation and incident response approach. Therefore, the tool enhances security operations’ efficiency, velocity, stability, and availability. Also it integrates every tool and application within an organization’s security. This way, a security team automates incident response workflows and reduces the time from breach discovery to resolution.
Features of SOAR
Prioritization And Automation
Basically, security tools generate many alerts that need to be prioritized. Hence, 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
Additionally, SOAR solutions automatically collect and validate data from various sources, including SIEM, and user behavior and entity analytics (UEBA) tools. in turn, 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. Teams convert playbooks into digital playbooks and automate these tasks.
Pros of SOAR
Moreover, SOAR has three pillars: orchestration, automation, and response. These pillars address different challenges. Primarily then allow automation and orchestration of tasks necessary for incident response and management.
Orchestration
Orchestration abilities enable all the technologies required to respond to a security incident to work together and seamlessly. Tool initiates a predefined workflow to deliver a solution and inform all stakeholders of an incident and its status.
Automation
Automation of SOAR’s is the pillar of the actual execution of the predefined processes that involve less human interaction. Firstly, 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
Response pillar constitutes all the security activities, operations, and processes involved in corroborating a security incident. Includes both automatic and manual processes. Well, you differentiate response into business related functions, security hardening activities, infrastructure collaboration and notification steps.
Cons of SOAR
- Very complex tool, that limits who takes advantage of SOAR.
- Integrations require technical expertise to implement.
- Caters primarily to security experts, they cannot enforce a security centric across the organization.
What is SIEM?
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
- Robust compliance reporting capability.
- Effortlessly integrate SIEM with other enterprise security controls.
- SIEM systems ingest threat intelligence data that indicates which IP addresses, websites, domains, etc., are associated with malicious behavior.
- Captures additional information about security events.
Pros of SIEM
Improves Response Time
Assists DevOps and Security team to view application, infrastructure, and network log data in one interface. Well, 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 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 automatically respond to attacks in progress and even stop them. For example, they limit or disconnect potentially compromised hosts, minimizing the impact of a breach. Speed and efficiency are huge benefits when dealing with security incidents. Moreover, 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.
- Very expensive.
- Requires technical expertise.
- Generates numerous false positives.
We have arrived to the main part of the article 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 center point and converts them into actionable intelligence. 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
Here, the SIEM tool regularly monitors and tunes to understand and differentiate between abnormal activities. Generates less efficient alerts and even takes more time to make this tool work for them. On the contrary, SOAR takes no 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
HR of 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 SIEM 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 acquire alerts of unwanted events and activities. In turn, 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.
- 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.
SOAR vs SIEM
- 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 imports that 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 ? We shall conclude this article blog.
SOAR vs SIEM - What's the Difference ? (Pros and Cons) Conclusion
Summing up SIEM is used for compliance, incident investigation, threat intelligence and vulnerability management. Opposed almost, the function of SOAR is to utilize playbooks, machine learning and automation to enhance threat intelligence and speed up security processes.
Summing up, SIEM and SOAR improve the entire security team due to them having the same standard components. Collecting of data is incredibly meaningful and SIEM produces more alerts. But SOAR enables the security team to handle the alert load quickly and efficiently, leading to higher performing SOC.
Cyber security industry or security team members need to understand their differences, as you cannot use them interchangeably.
