What Is Security Automation and SOAR?
SOAR — Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response — automates and coordinates security operations across many tools, so that routine work happens in seconds without a human clicking through it. Its promise is speed and relief from toil: enriching alerts, gathering context, and taking routine containment actions automatically, freeing analysts for the judgment calls that actually need them. The art is knowing what to automate and what not to.
What does SOAR do?#
SOAR executes playbooks — codified versions of your runbooks — that stitch together actions across your security stack:
| Task | Automated action |
|---|---|
| Alert enrichment | Add threat intel, IOC lookups, context |
| Investigation | Gather host, user, and network details |
| Containment | Isolate a host, block an indicator |
| Ticketing | Create and update case records |
By orchestrating across the SIEM, EDR, firewalls, and more, SOAR turns a multi-step manual process into a single automated flow — dramatically cutting response time for well-understood scenarios.
Automate the toil, not the thinking#
The boundary matters. Automate what is repetitive, well-defined, and high-volume — the enrichment and context-gathering that consume analyst hours. Keep humans in the loop for ambiguous, high-impact, or judgment-heavy decisions, because an automated containment action firing on a false positive can itself cause an outage. Good SOAR amplifies analysts; it does not replace their judgment.
SOAR scales security operations through automation. More at the Defense & Hardening hub.
Frequently asked questions#
What is SOAR?
SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) is a category of tools that automate and coordinate security operations tasks across different systems. It executes predefined playbooks — enriching alerts, gathering context, taking containment actions, updating tickets — reducing manual toil and speeding response, while escalating decisions that need human judgment.
What security tasks should you automate?
Automate repetitive, well-defined, high-volume tasks: enriching alerts with threat intelligence, gathering context on a host or user, blocking known-bad indicators, and routine containment steps. Keep humans in the loop for ambiguous decisions, high-impact actions, and anything requiring judgment. Automate the toil, not the thinking.