Security automation with SOAR: Streamlining incident response

Many security teams are overwhelmed by thousands of alerts each day, but only a fraction are genuine threats that require immediate attention. This constant barrage can cause teams to miss critical issues—or even breaches.

That’s why Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) is a better bet than manual triage and investigation. With SOAR solutions in place, teams no longer have to separate real risks from noise or carry out standard investigative procedures. Instead, SOAR systems handle everything automatically.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what SOAR is, its benefits, implementation steps, and how to measure its success.

What is SOAR?

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) refers to a suite of security tools that collect threat data and alerts from multiple sources, enrich them with context from your infrastructure and your Infrastructure as Code, and automate remediation.

Every element of a SOAR system works together to accelerate and improve incident response:

• The security orchestration component helps you connect different security tools and systems together, preventing blind spots.
• The automation component handles repetitive tasks without requiring human intervention, freeing up teams to focus on complex decisions.
• The response component triggers automatic actions that remediate problems and help organizations recover from security incidents.

What are the benefits of SOAR?

SOAR strengthens your security posture in the following ways.

Reduces your mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR)

An attacker’s window of opportunity is the time between the detection of a security threat and your response to it. SOAR platforms provide around-the-clock coverage and instant responses, slashing MTTD and MTTR (especially compared to manual processes).

When implemented properly, SOAR solutions detect the threat, determine severity, execute initial containment actions, and escalate it to human analysis within seconds rather than hours.

Combats alert fatigue

Security engineers can get overwhelmed by the number of alerts they receive and end up ignoring most of them. SOAR solves alert fatigue by automating risk validation, providing only high-fidelity alerts that matter.

Providing instant, standardized response

With trusted automated playbooks in place, security engineers have time to implement new playbooks and focus on threat hunting.

Preventing human Errors

Human errors are one of the leading causes of security incidents. SOAR automated playbooks, on the other hand, leave no room for mistakes. Another benefit? By using playbooks, you prove to regulators that your organization follows established procedures for handling incidents involving sensitive data, a major compliance requirement.

Limiting configuration drift

SOAR platforms reduce configuration drift across security tools because you define your playbooks as code, and everything is version-controlled and peer-reviewed.

7-step framework to get started with SOAR

Implementing SOAR can seem overwhelming, especially for organizations that don’t currently rely on automation much: You need to integrate multiple security tools, build even more complex workflows, and change your processes. Luckily, successful SOAR adoption is a journey, and you don’t need to automate everything immediately.

Follow the following framework to adopt SOAR easily and incrementally.

1. Evaluate your current state

Before implementing anything, assess your current incident response processes, including how common incidents are handled, where delays occur, and which alert types generate the most false positives. During this step, you should also evaluate what kind of security tools you’re using and review your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) rules and correlation logic. Talk to your security team and your SREs to understand the pain points from their perspective.

2. Define your objectives

Your priorities will depend on your organization’s security maturity and size, but common goals are:

• Handling more alerts without increasing headcount
• Reducing MTTD and MTTR below specified thresholds
• Giving time back to security engineers by automating repetitive tasks
• Improving compliance stats related to incident handling
• Enabling 24/7/365 response capabilities

3. Identify quick wins

In this step, pinpoint time-consuming tasks that follow predictable patterns. These are exactly the kinds of headaches that automation solves. For example, some teams get the same low-severity alert over and over again. SOAR tools help solve these issues automatically and log everything to ensure that you stay compliant.

4. Decide If You Want to Build or If You Want to Buy

There’s no correct answer here. Custom automation offers the flexibility you need, but at the same time, it requires ongoing maintenance, has no built-in integration, and can become a bottleneck when there are API changes.

On the other hand, commercial platforms like Cortex XSOAR, Splunk SOAR, and Microsoft Sentinel accelerate time to value by offering ready-to-use playbooks. (Licensing fees and potential vendor lock-in are the trade-offs.)

Most organizations go for a mix of both—purchasing a SOAR platform for core orchestration, while leveraging in-house solutions for unique requirements.

5. Build a proof-of-concept (PoC)

After choosing whether to build or buy, implement a PoC that’s based on your objectives and quick wins. You’re aiming for one that runs long enough to handle real incidents but is limited in scope so that you can be certain it contains risks.

Once your PoC seems reliable, build appropriate guardrails before deploying it to your production environment. To gauge how it’s working, closely monitor results in production and compare them to outcomes from your manual approach.

6. Scale

As soon as your automation proves to be successful, you can expand to additional scenarios. Your overall goal is to build a library of reusable components that are version-controlled, making it easier to update and build on top of them.

7. Collect data and make iterative Iimprovements

Revisit your objectives from Step 2 and collect data to see if you’re meeting them. Some goals will be easy to measure quantitatively by comparing past metrics with SOAR metrics (e.g., MTTD/MTTR reduction). Other goal measurements demand a qualitative approach: If you wanted to relieve your engineers of repetitive tasks, for example, talk to them and see if that changed. Use this data to make changes to your playbooks as needed.

SOAR implementation examples

Next, let’s look at two examples of SOAR in action.

1. A phishing response playbook

Phishing is one of the most common attack vectors, and security teams receive hundreds of emails daily. To protect your systems, a playbook for phishing should include these steps:

1. Start by extracting all URLs and attachments from the reported email.
2. Use threat intelligence platforms like URLhaus to check if URLs or file hashes are malicious. Also check the sender's name and email address against threat databases.
3. Check your email server to see how many other users have received the email and whether recipients have clicked links or opened attachments. Let affected individuals know they were a phishing attack target, and tell them what measures they should take to avoid further issues.
4. If the email is malicious, your playbook should automatically remove it from all mailboxes, block the sender's domain, and add URLs to your web proxy’s block lists. On the other hand, if the SOAR tool is unsure about the email, it should escalate it to a security engineer with all investigation data already compiled.

Throughout this process, the SOAR platform should log all actions and create a ticket that’s automatically updated with findings.

Remember: Even if the email is routed to a security engineer, your team still saves a lot of time they would have spent investigating. At this stage, a security engineer should be able to click a button and select whether the email was a phishing attempt. If it’s not, the SOAR platform stops there. Otherwise, your playbook continues and automatically responds by blocking everything.

2. A vulnerability response playbook

When vulnerability scanners identify new issues in your IaC, container images, Kubernetes manifests, or even your cloud accounts, SOAR tools should enrich each finding with contextual data.

Let’s take a look at an example of an IaC vulnerability, a public S3 bucket. Your SOAR tool should follow these steps:

1. SOAR detects the vulnerability and assesses its severity by determining if any sensitive data is exposed in the S3 bucket.
2. Next, based on the severity, your SOAR playbook should automatically create tickets, assign them to the infrastructure teams that handle those components, and notify them in channels they use (i.e., Slack or MS Teams).
3. If the vulnerability is common and has a straightforward solution, the SOAR system might come up with a pull request to provide a fix for it. Otherwise, it will wait for the engineer's input.
4. Finally, the SOAR system should track the remediation process. Once it’s marked as solved, SOAR tools should automatically run checks to verify that the fixes were applied successfully, reopening the ticket if not.

Move from manual response to security automation

As cloud environments and AI systems scale, manual incident response can’t keep pace. SOAR provides a path forward by automating repetitive tasks and orchestrating complex workflows across multiple tools. By adopting SOAR, you make a smart step toward resilience, delivering faster reaction times and consistent responses 24/7/365—even with limited or unavailable security teams.

RapidScale can help your organization adopt SOAR by providing expertise in platform selection, implementation planning, and playbook development. RapidScale works closely with your team to understand your unique security challenges and existing tool ecosystem to offer you tailored solutions for SOAR implementation. Contact us today to learn more.