SOAR vs. SIEM in cybersecurity is similar to the rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox in sports. Despite having several comparable components, both software have distinct features. As these platforms are unavoidable in streamlining your incident response process, understanding their differences is vital in choosing the best option for your business. Read on to find more.

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Article Roadmap

• What Is SIEM?
• What Is SOAR?
• Key Differences
• Legacy SIEM vs. Cloud SIEM vs. Cloud SOAR
• SOAR or SIEM: What’s Better for You?
• The Optimal Choice: Implementing SIEM and SOAR Together
• Questions To Ask
• Next Steps

What Is SIEM?

Security information and event management (SIEM) is a combined approach that collects and aggregates data from numerous sources like applications, endpoints, networks and servers throughout your IT landscape. It then analyzes this data to identify suspicious events and alert security teams.

SIEM integrates security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) modules into one solution. It uses a centralized console to collect and correlate data and rank them according to criticality. With real-time alerts and prioritization, IT professionals can investigate potential threats and create better incident response plans.

Components

As mentioned above, SIEM is an integrated solution combining several cybersecurity tools into one platform to offer a comprehensive cyber defense. Here are its main components:

• Log management is the primary module responsible for event data and log collection and storage.
• Security information management (SIM) focuses on managing security-related information from multiple data sources. These sources include DNS servers, routers, antivirus applications and data loss prevention (DLP) tools.
• Security event management (SEM) tools monitor and analyze data, encompassing activities such as alerting, data visualization and event correlation.

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What Is SOAR?

Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) is a comprehensive set of integrated tools and technologies that helps security teams automate their threat data collection and incident response processes. It’s a modern next-generation security system with broader use cases compared to SIEM. It uses AI technology to prioritize, coordinate and automate threat detection and response efforts.

SOAR playbooks offer remediation steps that can be either fully automated or manually executed. Besides incident response, the platform helps proactively detect advanced and sophisticated threats like insider threats, DDoS, advanced persistent threats (APT), advanced malware and ransomware attacks. Detection and response to a phishing campaign can be a good example.

Unlike traditional systems, SOAR actively monitors, detects and offers quarantine, investigation, reporting and threat mitigation capabilities.

Components

SOAR systems, like SIEM, consist of three essential components:

• Security orchestration analyzes, correlates and integrates security event data from different sources like endpoint security solutions to improve incident response. It enables coordination with other cybersecurity systems for businesses dealing with complex threats. For example, SOAR can integrate with SIEM to notify security teams of malicious URLs and block them.
• Automation is a primary component of SOAR that relieves security professionals from manual threat detection and incident response tasks, mitigating the risk of human error. It offers automated security events triage, incident response, containment, audits, enforcement and health checks.
• Threat response allows SOAR systems to prioritize suspicious events based on their criticality and create an effective threat response plan. It also automatically executes a set of predefined response commands to contain and mitigate identified threats immediately.

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Key Differences

You can think of SOAR as an updated or evolved version of SIEM. Both systems collect and aggregate threat information from multiple sources and help security teams devise more effective incident response plans.

However, the scope, location, quantity of sources, as well as the data collected differ between the two. For instance, SIEM collects data from traditional hosts like servers, networks and applications, whereas SOAR goes beyond that. It enables access to external solutions like endpoint protection platforms, endpoint monitoring, EDR solutions and threat intelligence and pulls in the feed from these sources.

While SIEM mainly collects and aggregates event data to generate alerts, SOAR categorizes them, creates a predefined investigation path after alerting and provides contextual alerts to security professionals.

Get deep visibility into the incident response plan with SOAR active workflow. Source

SIEM identifies threats and alerts security teams in real time. On the other hand, SOAR goes one step further to contain threats and even offers remedial capabilities with the help of automation, AI and ML, enabling a more proactive response.

Legacy SIEM vs. Cloud SIEM vs. Cloud SOAR

Feature	Legacy SIEM	Cloud SIEM	Cloud SOAR
Scalability	Scalability is limited based on the capacity of the hardware you’ve installed it on.	Highly scalable and benefits from the resources of cloud providers.	Provides excellent scalability in terms of adoption to changing and growing demands.
Data Collection	Collects data from manually configured and integrated data sources.	Uses cloud-based resources, applications and servers to aggregate data, simplifying the process.	Offers access to third-party software and other solutions for automated data collection and pulling information.
Monitoring	Provides basic-level monitoring and doesn’t generate logs when any module malfunctions.	Offers deep visibility and displays interactive data on dashboards and embedded workflows.	Gives updates on malfunctioning in real time and features in-depth monitoring.
Updates	Requires manual updates, making the process time-consuming and daunting.	Receives regular updates from vendors. Enforcing updates is also straightforward.	Automatically updates itself with the latest patches and software versions by the cloud provider.
Data Analysis and Alerting	Doesn’t provide in-depth data analysis and often provides false alerts.	Incorporates advanced threat correlation and data analytics tools to reduce false positives and enhance threat identification.	Enables automated workflows, alert validation and playbook activation, providing top-notch analysis and minimizing false alerts.
Pricing	Includes upfront costs for licensing, hardware and maintenance.	Usually works on a monthly or yearly subscription cost with one-time installation charges.	Comes with a subscription model based on usage, scale and other requirements.

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SOAR or SIEM: What’s Better for You?

Now that we’ve covered the key differences between SOAR and SIEM, the most important question arises: Which solution is the best for my business? The answer, as you may have already guessed, is SOAR.

This is simply because SOAR is an evolved version of SIEM and naturally contains more cutting-edge modules, providing you with the most sophisticated threat detection and incident response system. It features advanced functionality, a comprehensive focus, prioritization of security incidents and alerts, and better threat management.

Having said that, it’s important to remember that you can achieve comprehensive protection for your system by implementing both solutions in tandem. You should only go for SOAR if budget constraints prevent you from implementing it alongside SIEM.

The Optimal Choice: Implementing SIEM and SOAR Together

Implementing SIEM or SOAR solutions together can yield comprehensive results in terms of security. This is because SIEM solutions provide security alerts, and then the security operations (SecOps) team is responsible for investigating them. However, SOAR can prioritize and contextualize those alerts and provide necessary remediation measures.

SIEM increases the mean time to respond (MTTR) by creating numerous security alerts. SOAR improves this aspect by automating prioritization, although it may not directly impact the mean time to detect (MTTD). Deploying both solutions together helps significantly reduce MTTD and MTTR results.

Questions To Ask

Whether you should implement SOAR and SIEM together or individually depends completely on your business requirements. While it’s best to deploy both, consider asking these questions to better understand what’s best for you.

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• What’s our cybersecurity budget?
• How many employees do we have in our security teams?
• Do we deal with sensitive information in our company?
• What other cybersecurity systems do we already have in place?
• Can my existing solutions integrate with the platform?
• What problems are we trying to solve with the new integration?
• What kind of deployment is best for us?

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Next Steps

Data security has become paramount for businesses worldwide, and you can no longer take any chances. While SOAR has various advantages, implementing both solutions together can help you achieve optimum results. If you need further help selecting the best fit, check out our free comparison report on top business leaders.

Which side are you on in the SOAR vs. SIEM debate? Let us know in the comments below!