Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR)

What Is SOAR?

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) refers to a suite of tools and practices that help security teams automate repetitive tasks, coordinate responses across systems, and take action by accelerating security incident response. SOAR platforms bring together security operations’ alerts from multiple sources, apply logic to evaluate them, and trigger actions – often without needing human intervention.

At its core, it is designed to help organizations improve security in several ways:

• Handle massive volumes of security alerts and data collection
• Respond faster to real threats and vulnerabilities
• Reduce manual workloads for security operations center (SOC) teams
• Improve the consistency, scalability, and efficiency of security operations

In this glossary, we aim to explain the full meaning, relevancy, and controversy of the technology today while simultaneously explaining the nuances between it and SIEM.

 

Why SOAR Remains Relevant

Despite debates about its future (more on this below), SOAR remains critically important to security operations teams, especially as threat volumes, attack complexity and vulnerabilities continue to rise. In 2024, Forescout observed 900 million attacks – up 114% from 2023’s 420 million attacks. Meanwhile, organizations face daily alerts from dozens of security tools, and many of these alerts are false positives or low priority. SOC teams simply can’t keep up.

To address this challenge, security operations teams need to:

• Automate repetitive detection and triage tasks
• Coordinate across siloed security systems and data collection sources
• Reduce the time it takes to detect, investigate, and contain threats and vulnerabilities
• Scale incident response without hiring more analysts — with some solutions using AI to help the scale

 

Common Cybersecurity Threats

SOAR helps defend against a wide range of modern cyber threats, including:

• Phishing and email attacks. Automated playbooks can scan suspicious emails, isolate attachments, and remove messages across inboxes before users interact with them.
• Ransomware. It can detect unusual encryption patterns and shut down infected endpoints in seconds.
• Credential theft and account takeover. By integrating with identity providers, it can detect abnormal login behavior and automatically lock accounts or trigger step-up authentication.
• Malicious IPs and domains. It can correlate threat intelligence feeds and block known bad actors across firewall and proxy systems instantly.
• Insider threats. When integrated with behavior analytics tools, it can flag and respond to anomalous behavior by employees or contractors.

 

How SOAR Works

SOAR solutions integrate with a wide range of security operation tools—such as SIEMs, firewalls, threat intelligence feeds, and endpoint detection systems—to build automated “playbooks” for detecting, prioritizing, investigating, and responding to threats. In the process, they automate repetitive tasks and orchestrate incident response across systems.

While these platforms vary in complexity, most follow a four-stage security operation framework that includes:

Threat Detection & Enrichment

These platforms ingest alerts and threat intelligence data from other tools with the goal of centralizing and enriching this information, so that SOC analysts can prioritize the most critical threats.

• Threat intelligence enrichment – Adds context to alerts using third-party threat intelligence (e.g., IP reputation, malware indicators).
• Log ingestion and normalization – Pulls data from multiple tools and presents it in a standard, actionable format.
• Alert deduplication – Filters out noise and false positives, grouping related alerts into meaningful incidents.

Incident Prioritization & Decision-Making

Once it enriches the information from reliable threat intelligence, the platform uses logic and machine learning to assess severity and decide next steps:

• Risk scoring – Ranks incidents based on potential impact, helping analysts focus on what matters most.
• Playbook triggers – Determines which automated response workflows should be executed based on incident type, asset value, or user role.
• Analyst collaboration tools – Enables human review or escalation for high-severity or ambiguous events.

Automated Response & Remediation

This is where the technology shines by executing playbooks to contain, neutralize, or escalate threats with little (or no) human input. The remediation steps it takes to reduce mean time to respond (MTTR) and prevent threats from spreading unchecked include:

• Isolating infected devices on the network
• Blocking IPs or domains at the firewall level
• Disabling compromised user accounts or forcing credential resets
• Quarantining files or devices via endpoint tools
• Creating incident tickets or notifying stakeholders automatically

Post-Incident Analysis & Reporting

After remediation, these platforms close the loop with:

• Automated documentation of actions taken for audit and compliance
• Metrics dashboards tracking response time, analyst workload, and incident trends
• Playbook optimization based on feedback and evolving threat patterns

 

Key Benefits

Implementing this kind of platform offers several major benefits for organizations looking to modernize their security operations:

1. Faster Incident Response – It dramatically reduces the time between alert and action. By automating containment and remediation steps, organizations can respond in seconds rather than hours, minimizing the window of exposure.

2. Increased Efficiency and Analyst Productivity – By automating repetitive tasks like IP blocking, log gathering, or phishing email triage, it frees analysts to focus on complex threats and proactive hunting. This also reduces burnout and improves job satisfaction in security teams.

3. Improved Threat Accuracy and Prioritization – It integrates threat intelligence data from multiple sources and applies context. This reduces false positives and surfaces the incidents that matter most. As a result, analysts spend less time sifting through “noise” and more time solving real problems.

4. Reduced Costs and Improved Scalability – With security teams stretched thin, SOAR helps scale operations without growing headcount. Automation handles growing volumes of alerts, making it easier to keep pace with rising threats.

5. Stronger Compliance and Governance – It ensures consistent and auditable policy enforcement. Playbooks automatically document what actions were taken and when – streamlining security audits, breach reporting, and regulatory compliance (e.g., NIST, HIPAA, ISO 27001, GDPR).

6. Better Collaboration Between Teams – With built-in workflows and integrations across IT, legal, and other stakeholders, it ensures everyone is looped in when they need to be – without drowning them in email or collaboration threads.

 

SOAR and Security Automation Work in Tandem

While the terms are often used interchangeably, they are not exactly the same. Understanding their differences can help organizations choose the right approach or combine them effectively.

Scope and Focus

 How They Work Together

Security automation executes tasks at speed and scale, while SOAR provides the structure and oversight to coordinate those actions into a cohesive, intelligent response. Specifically, security automation does things like scan logs or block IPs, while SOAR pulls everything together: managing alerts, applying logic, triggering workflows, and tracking outcomes across tools and teams.

Consider how this works with a phishing email. The email would trigger:

• Automation scans the message, sandbox the attachment, and block a domain.
• SOAR correlates the incident, notify analysts, assign the case, and document the response.

In many cases, organizations benefit from using both. Automation provides speed and efficiency, and SOAR provides coordination, intelligence, and scalability.

 

SOAR and SIEM: Complementary Technologies

What’s a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management)? Why is SIEM often confused with SOAR? There is some crossover – as well as a lot of features that have been adopted within SIEM platforms and solutions.

A SIEM is different. The two serve different – yet complementary – purposes. In fact, many modern security teams use them together —  with SIEM providing visibility and analytics and SOAR providing efficient response.

 

Becoming Obsolete? A Close Look at the Controversy

While SOAR continues to be widely used, its future as a standalone category separate from SIEM has come under scrutiny. Different industry stakeholders seem to be at odds with one another, especially as SIEM technologies and platforms continue to evolve.

Gartner’s Position

In recent guidance, Gartner labeled SOAR as “obsolete” in some contexts, suggesting that its capabilities are increasingly being embedded into broader security operations platforms – especially SIEM and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions. This opinion reflects a broader trend toward consolidated platforms that simplify tool sprawl and reduce the integration burden for security teams.

CISA’s Silence

Adding to the uncertainty, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) – a key authority in U.S. national cybersecurity – hasn’t published any formal updates or guidance on it for several years. While this doesn’t mean it is irrelevant, it indicates a shift in focus toward more integrated or outcome-based solutions.

Industry Pushback

However, not everyone agrees that it’s on the way out. In the Dark Reading article “SOAR is Dead. Long Live SOAR”, cybersecurity experts argue that its core functions are more necessary than ever – just less siloed.

As the article explains, the foundational principles are here to stay but are being absorbed into platforms, including SIEMs, that make them easier to use.

Whether or not it remains a distinct market category, everyone agrees that it provides a lot of value. As threats grow in speed and complexity, the need to automate and orchestrate security operations and reduce SOC workloads also grows. Whether integrated into a SIEM, delivered via a TDR platform, or deployed as a standalone tool, this technology remains a critical capability for any modern security program.

 

Best Practices for Implementation

Whether deploying a dedicated platform or integrating its capabilities within a broader solution like a SIEM, organizations should follow these best practices:

1. Start small: Begin by automating low-risk, high-volume tasks like phishing triage or IP blocking.
2. Build and test playbooks: Do not attempt to automate everything at once, and test workflows before going live.
3. Collaborate across teams: Security, IT, DevOps, and compliance teams should work together to align playbooks with business goals.
4. Continuously improve: Update workflows as threats evolve and collect metrics to optimize performance.
5. Ensure visibility: Use dashboards and KPIs to show the impact of SOAR, especially to executive stakeholders.

 

How Forescout Can Help

Forescout enhances its strategies by providing the deep visibility, continuous monitoring, and automated control needed to power effective incident response. With Forescout, organizations can use SOAR to:

• Discover and monitor every connected device, including IT, IoT, OT, and cloud assets.
• Trigger automated playbooks based on real-time asset context and policy violations.
• Enrich incident response workflows with device identity, posture, and behavioral data.
• Orchestrate policy-based responses like quarantining devices or restricting access.
• Integrate seamlessly with top SOAR, SIEM, and threat intelligence platforms.

Using Forescout’s Security Automation solutions, organizations can extend SOAR beyond traditional IT environments into areas where visibility and control are traditionally difficult, such as IoT and operational technology.