Peanut butter and jelly. Holmes and Watson. Salt and pepper. Some things are just meant to be together.
The same should be said about Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR). Both are essential solutions in a strong security posture that serve key roles in defending organizations from cyberattacks.
But, when used together, they enable even the smallest security teams to tackle the biggest problems with ease. Let’s explore why SIEM and SOAR deserve to be the next iconic pairing in your security stack.
To understand how they work so well together, it’s important to see how SIEM and SOAR operate separately.
Visibility is key to any security investigation. SIEM ingests data from across the IT environment, normalizing, aggregating, and displaying it in one pane of glass for security teams to gain insights into activities. Paired with detection rules, either pre-built or self-managed, SIEM detects anomalous behavior that indicates potential compromise or exploitation that can lead to security breaches.
Within the SIEM, IT and security teams can gain a holistic understanding of their threat landscape, both for incident response and ongoing optimization. The best SIEMs go a step further, correlating and contextualizing alerts to create associated cases. These cases link together activities that signal larger security events, making it easier for teams to drill into important issues.
Security is a game of speed, so streamlining response capabilities makes it easier to prevent an attacker from achieving their goals. SOAR leverages playbooks that activate when certain triggers occur, kicking off orchestrated, automated responses leveraging data and processes across the organization. These playbooks act automatically on behalf of the security team, isolating hosts or manipulating user accounts to prevent unauthorized behaviors as an example.
Using SOAR allows security teams to respond much quicker to security events. This not only helps to prevent cyberattacks and limit their spread/blast radius but also gives organizations the ability to prioritize other goals without compromising on security.
The visibility of SIEM and quick action of SOAR make a natural pair. When suspicious activity is identified, SOAR responds first, taking remedial action to prevent further compromise. SIEM aggregates that information, and any other alerts related to the event, presenting it all in one location.
As a result, security teams don’t need to extensively comb their environment for threats, since everything is visible in a unified manner. Incident response is streamlined and threats to the organization are stopped sooner. This means that even small security teams can address major threats proactively.
Beyond the obvious benefits of stopping attacks, SIEM and SOAR together provide other key capabilities to organizations. SIEM and SOAR provide condensed action chains that showcase the efficacy of a security program. For reporting and compliance purposes, this highlights wins for stakeholders and shows auditors that the program is robust and adheres to regulatory requirements.
From an operations perspective, SIEM and SOAR make it simple to understand and address security events. Given how stretched today’s security teams are in terms of budget, personnel, and, in some cases, expertise, SIEM and SOAR empower organizations to improve their security posture.
Take advantage of the combined power of SIEM and SOAR today. Contact us to learn how to start using SIEM and SOAR from a comprehensive security cloud today.
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