Is SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, And Response) Obsolete?
Security Boulevard, Thursday, November 14th, 2024
You may have heard that SOAR is dead. Vendors have become afraid of the term, repositioning their security automation products with different labels. But are the people claiming SOAR's demise making substantial arguments, or are they simply trying to promote their own products by putting SOAR down?
Let's look at the factors behind the push to declare the end of SOAR, consider their merits, and determine whether or not SOAR is obsolete.
A Brief History of SOAR
To understand the current state of SOAR, we first need to quickly review its history. The acronym SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response) was introduced by the analyst firm Gartner in 2016 to refer to technologies that combined the existing fields of incident response, threat intelligence management, and security orchestration and automation. As automation became undeniably central to the future of incident response, many existing players in the incident response space would soon embrace the SOAR label, such as Resilient Systems, which was acquired by IBM in 2017 and ultimately rebranded as IBM QRadar SOAR.