Why Organizations Need Security Orchestration
Corporate environments are becoming increasingly complex. Organizations now have a wide variety of systems scattered across on-prem data centers and cloud-based deployments. The rise of remote work further complicates the issue as employees work from personal and mobile devices.
Securing the modern enterprise environment requires security solutions that can defend multiple platforms against a wide range of attack vectors. In most cases, organizations have chosen to deploy standalone security solutions to address specific use cases.
The problem with this approach is that security teams are overwhelmed with a deluge of security alerts and struggle to effectively manage and monitor their complex cyber security architectures. Security orchestration helps to address this issue by streamlining and automating threat detection and response.
SOAR vs. SIEM vs. XDR
Among the many different tools used in typical security operations centers, three of the main tools used are the legacy SIEM and SOAR and the recently trending XDR tools.
A security information and event management (SIEM) tool combines data from different sources and uses analytics to detect the most likely threats.
SOAR solutions are built to incorporate many modules, regularly from different providers. They allow companies to rationalize security operations in a few areas: attack management, response, and security operations automation.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) tools assimilate security visibility across companies’ entire organization, including gateways, endpoints, cloud, mobile, and IoT, to identify advanced and distributed threats, leverage data analytics and threat intelligence, and respond automatically to recognized attacks. XDR creates the context and flows for the analyst to support incident triage, investigation, and rapid remediation.
Where SIEM Falls Short
Despite their various benefits, SIEMs are not ideal solutions to the challenges that security operation center (SOC) analysts face. Some of the most prominent limitations of SIEMs include spending a great deal of time configuring and integrating a SIEM solution with current security architecture. Threat detection capabilities are mainly rule-based, missing new attacks or ones that do not follow an established pattern. Also, alerts are generated based on the aggregated data from various solutions across an organization. However, validation is not performed, creating false positive detections.
The main disadvantage of a SIEM is its lack of ability to make the complete “attack story” and visualize it in an actionable manner to the analyst. Instead, logs are just being correlated, leaving the analyst to determine why the events were correlated and what happened.
The Benefits and Limitations of SOAR
SOAR solutions are designed to integrate multiple security components, often from different vendors. A stack of compatible security tools enables companies to collect data about attacks and respond to them without human intervention. SOAR tool’s primary target is to increase the effectiveness of security operations. SOAR tools’ main mechanisms are security orchestration, automation, and response.
Regardless of their benefits, SOAR tools lack available APIs and have some data unification issues and a detached workflow from the detection action. SOAR receives inputs from many devices, but it doesn’t have the enforcement point – an endpoint, gateway, email solution, etc. Also, users testify that serious work is needed to achieve SOAR’s full potential across many suppliers.
Making the Move to XDR
For midsize organizations, XDR offers an alternative to the expensive and complicated SIEM/SOAR stack used by large companies. XDR is well-positioned as an alternative to the limited solutions available today.
For these organizations looking for a practical approach, XDR is a single platform that can do all: starting with a prevention first approach, detection, investigation, threat hunting, response, and remediation.
For mature organizations with already multi-vendor security solutions, including SIEM, etc., XDR will provide APIs to use its capabilities and benefits on top of the existing stack. A SOAR solution can work for the more prominent organizations if they have resources for integration, playbook development, etc.
Deploying Security Operations with Check Point
With Check point’s Infinity XDR/XPR you will be able to use a single application across all vectors to maximize ROI and operational efficiency. It allows you to use a single SaaS solution to detect, investigate, hunt, respond to attacks across all threat vectors, and leverage your existing Check Point security stack by reusing the infrastructure for detection and response.
It is also simple to onboard as it integrates with your current ecosystem, including any SIEM/SOAR platform. Check Point Security Operations solutions offer a set of APIs to SIEM and SOAR customers. Additionally, automated playbooks are provided to optimize and speed up incident response and apply effective remediation with a single click, integrated with leading SOAR platforms for a smooth end-to-end process flow.
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