How SIEM and SOAR are Different from Each Other

With the growing range of cyber-security issues, security tools and technologies are also widely available in the market. And if you have ever been to an IT or cybersecurity industry, you probably have heard about the terms SIEM and SOAR.

But what are they? What is their purpose? Are they different or the same? Which one do we need? When we talk about SOAR vs. SIEM, it is mandatory to understand their primary differences.

For a few more minutes, you are going to read about the basics behind them, their critical differences, and how they work together to speed up the security fundamentals.

The Background

No human being can manage to monitor a whole network manually, especially when we talk about vast and complex enterprises.

Therefore, SIEM is a sort of computerized technology that keeps track of network monitoring by recording and collecting data in the form of logs and packets. It holds a check on the flow of traffic through the network, paying undivided attention to patterns that can be an indication of a cyber attack.

Then, using a database of information and artificial intelligence software, it attempts to learn distinct patterns that can suggest that a particular network is under seize and alert IT managers, and security professionals.

SOAR, not similar to SIEM, collects information from a wide range of platforms and transfers it to a single, central base-station that engineers can then evaluate.

You might also feel glad to hear that SOAR also mechanics the process of incident response by analyzing and classifying each specific incident and then deciding whether there is a requirement for a human employee to do more work.

It also helps to eliminate the need for people to respond to constant alerts manually and enables engineers to categorize different threats for evaluation.

SIEM vs. SOAR: Basic Difference

SIEM is an acronym for Security Information and Event Management. It refers to the tools and technologies for effectively gathering and storing security data. Common examples of SIEM include logs of firewall, logs of antivirus, anti-malware softwares, hashes of downloaded files, and records of user activity.

The process of collecting all this data, parsing it, and then storing it in a useful structure is called information management.

SOAR is an acronym for Security Orchestration, Automation and Response.

Basically, Security orchestration makes it possible for various security measures from different vendors to communicate with each other. In this solution, security data from proprietary formats are translated into normal formats, resulting in efficient and robust information management.

In Security automation, a specific set of rules and regulations known as playbooks are used to take action without manual intervention from an analyst.

Lastly, the Security response tells us about dealing with confirmed security problems. It is an approach to address and manage the security incident, once an alert has been reaffirmed, including triage, containment, remediation, and more.

Some SIEM Platforms

Splunk

Splunk Enterprise Security is a SIEM solution to monitor firewall logs of all locations, network logs, and other alerts. It can help you get the real idea of your network environment, VPN alerts, and more.

EvenTracker is the crucial element of Splunk as it alone manages and reviews all logs which can be a daunting task for humans.

IBM QRadar

QRadar is another prominent SIEM solution that can be deployed as a hardware appliance, a software appliance, or a virtual appliance depending upon the requirement and strength of your organization.

It keeps a check on all the events linked with a particular threat in one place to save time and workforce. This can be beneficial for your company to focus more on investigation and response.

LogRhythm

If you are a start-up or a small-sized company, Logrhythm can be a smart pick for you. It works on built-in playbooks that work automatically during collection data.

This end-to-end solution can help you to navigate across your IT environment quickly and mitigate as well as recover any cyber-security issue that occurs.

Some SOAR Platforms

Demisto Enterprise

It is a SAOR solution that offers complete analyzation from Tier-1 to Tier-3 and optimizes the whole security incident.

You will definitely love the easy-to-build, drag-and-drop playbooks features of Demisto with a laundry list of other security benefits.

IBM Resilient

Resilient SOAR is one of the leading platforms for orchestrating and automating incident response procedures.

Many add-on features of IBM Resilient such as dynamic playbooks, perfect agility, intelligence, and complexity makes it efficient against sophisticated attacks.

DFLabs

DFLabs is yet another SOAR platform, IncMan SOAR, formulated explicitly for SOCs, CSIRTs, and MSSPs to computerize, orchestrate and mitigate security operations and incident response processes and tasks.

Which of them is an Effective Solution?

SIEM and SOAR both intend to bring a positive change in the lives of the whole security team, from security analysts to CISO. They help in enhancing efficiency and efficacy.

SIEM usually needs consistent tuning to acknowledge and differentiate between abnormal and normal activity continually. Since SIEM requires a regular adjustment, it becomes more and more time-consuming to keep and check instead of influxing data.

While gathering information, these solutions are potent to produce so many alerts that security teams can expect to respond to while still remaining efficient.

SOAR enables the security team to easily operate the alert load quickly and efficiently, leaving time for meaningful, skills-based tasks which results in a higher-performing SOC.

Wrapping up

While picking an information security solution, an analyst first understands the nature of the process, he/she needs to control. Sometimes, SIEM is just sufficient for optimization, whereas, in other times, SOAR can be the only solution. Some organizations have upgraded to the dual version of both.

Just like hot chocolate and chilled ice cream, SIEM and SOAR are perfectly great on their own, but, out of the world, together.

Akram Artoul, CEO of Web Eagle also believes that, “SIEM can be an indispensable solution for collecting and storing data in a useful format, while SOAR’s effectiveness lies in making use of collected data, saving security analysts the trouble of manually investigating and addressing to every suspicious intrusion they find.”