In today’s high-risk cyber environment, it is extremely vital to respond to security incidents in real-time. Security orchestration and security automation are often used interchangeably within an IT ecosystem, despite serving different purposes to achieve this.
Security automation vs. security orchestration
Security automation is the process of setting up a security task or operation to run without human intervention. Some tasks, especially those that need a human decision, are semi-automated. Orchestration, on the other hand, means the utilization of multiple automated processes within a single or more platform.
As such, multiple semi-automated and fully automated security operations enable orchestration, and this automatically executes complex workflows and processes. Orchestration allows optimization and streamlining of repeatable processes, thus ensuring correct task execution.
Security automation and orchestration has become mandatory
As cyber-attacks become more intelligent and complex, automating and orchestrating security functions has become a necessity due to the following benefits:
- Speed response:Security, Automation, and Response (SOAR) allows security teams to quickly identify and respond to incidences. Rather than using different tools, they are all integrated in a single platform that can be accessed easily.
- Integrates security tools with threat intelligence:Automating and orchestrating security tools allows integration with internally collected security threat data and external intelligence. Contextualizing and correlating threat data using multiple tools ensures the timely discovery of threat sources and vulnerabilities, ensuring mitigation before they are exploited.
- Simplified investigative processes: Automation and orchestration enable deployed security tools to investigate low-level risks on their own. For more complex alarms, SOAR tools provide a unified repository for security information, thus permitting faster and more accurate investigations.
- Integration with daily operations: Continuous monitoring is vital to identifying security threats while automating and orchestrating security tasks provides the ability to respond to these threats within minutes rather than days or weeks.