SOAR stands for Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response. It is a category of security platform that connects an organisation's security tools, automates repetitive analyst tasks through predefined workflows called playbooks, and provides structured case management for incident response. The category emerged to solve a fundamental problem: security teams have too many tools generating too many alerts, and not enough analysts to investigate them all manually.
For mid-market security teams wrestling with alert overload and limited headcount, understanding the category, and whether you actually need a standalone platform, is a critical architectural decision.
How Does SOAR Work?
These platforms sit at the centre of a security operations workflow, acting as the connective tissue between detection tools (like SIEMs and EDR platforms) and the actions analysts take to investigate and respond to threats.
The typical workflow follows this pattern:
- Alert ingestion: the platform receives alerts from connected security tools (SIEM, EDR, NDR, email security, firewalls, cloud platforms)
- Enrichment: the platform automatically enriches the alert with additional context by querying threat intelligence feeds, asset databases, user directories, and vulnerability scanners
- Playbook execution: based on the alert type, a predefined playbook executes a series of automated actions: deduplication, severity scoring, indicator analysis, and initial triage
- Decision point: the playbook either resolves the alert automatically (for known-benign patterns) or escalates it to an analyst with the enriched context attached
- Response actions: for confirmed threats, the platform can execute containment actions across connected tools: isolating endpoints, blocking IP addresses, disabling user accounts, or quarantining emails
- Case management: the entire incident lifecycle is tracked, documented, and available for post-incident review and compliance reporting
This workflow transforms security operations from a reactive, manual process into a structured, semi-automated one. The goal is to handle the predictable work automatically, freeing analysts to focus on the investigations that genuinely require human judgement.
What Are the Key Components of SOAR?
These platforms comprise three core capabilities, each addressing a different operational challenge.
Orchestration
Orchestration is the integration layer. It connects the platform to the dozens of security and IT tools in an organisation's environment: SIEM, EDR, firewalls, email gateways, threat intelligence platforms, ticketing systems, identity providers, and cloud management consoles.
Effective orchestration means the platform can both read from and write to these tools. It can pull alert data from the SIEM, query the EDR for process details, check an IP against threat intelligence, and then push a block rule to the firewall, all within a single automated workflow.
The quality of orchestration depends on the breadth and depth of available integrations. Leading platforms offer hundreds of pre-built connectors: Splunk says its product "integrates across 300+ third-party tools" (Splunk SOAR) and Palo Alto Networks advertises "900+ prebuilt integration and automation packs" (Cortex XSOAR). Real-world deployment still invariably requires custom integration work for proprietary or niche tools.
Automation
Automation is the execution engine. Playbooks, predefined, repeatable workflows, encode the steps an analyst would take for common alert types into automated sequences.
A phishing investigation playbook, for example, might:
- Extract URLs, attachments, and sender information from the reported email
- Detonate attachments in a sandbox environment
- Check URLs against known malicious domain lists
- Query the email gateway for other recipients of the same message
- Calculate a risk score based on the combined findings
- If low risk: auto-close with a note to the reporter
- If high risk: quarantine all instances, block the sender domain, and escalate to an analyst with full context
The power of automation scales with playbook coverage. Organisations that invest in building playbooks for their most common alert types can automate a large share of initial triage, reducing the manual burden on their SOC team.
Response
Response is the action layer. When a threat is confirmed, the platform executes containment and remediation actions across connected tools:
- Endpoint isolation: quarantine a compromised device via the EDR platform
- Network blocking: add malicious IPs or domains to firewall block lists
- Account actions: disable compromised user accounts, force password resets, or revoke active sessions through the identity provider
- Email actions: quarantine or delete malicious emails from all recipient mailboxes
- Ticket creation: generate incidents in ITSM platforms with full context and timeline
Response also includes case management, tracking the full lifecycle of an incident from initial detection through investigation, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident review. This structured documentation is increasingly important for regulatory compliance under frameworks like DORA and NIS2, both of which are now in enforcement and require demonstrable incident response processes. It also feeds the lessons-learned loop that NIST's incident response guidance places at the centre of continuous improvement (NIST SP 800-61r3, 2025).
What Problems Does SOAR Solve?
The category addresses several interconnected operational challenges that plague modern security operations:
Alert fatigue: Vectra's survey of 2,000 analysts found that "SOC teams receive 4,484 alerts each day on average" and that analysts "are unable to deal with over two-thirds (67%) of the daily alerts they receive" (Vectra AI, 2023). Without automation, analysts must manually triage each one: a process that leads to desensitisation, missed threats, and burnout. Playbooks automate the initial triage of predictable alert types, reducing the volume that reaches human analysts. For a deeper dive, see our guide on how to reduce alert fatigue.
Manual, repetitive triage: Analysts spend significant time on tasks that follow predictable patterns: checking indicators against threat intelligence, querying user directories, looking up asset information. These tasks are necessary but do not require human judgement. Playbooks automate them.
Slow response times: When response actions require manual execution across multiple tools, logging into the firewall to block an IP, then the EDR to isolate an endpoint, then the identity provider to disable an account, mean time to respond (MTTR) increases. Orchestration executes these actions simultaneously and in seconds.
Tool silos: Most security teams operate a long list of separate security tools. Without orchestration, analysts must manually pivot between consoles to gather context during investigations. Orchestration centralises this context by pulling relevant data from all connected tools into a single investigation view.
Analyst burnout and turnover: In the same Vectra survey, two-thirds of analysts said they "are considering leaving or are actively leaving their jobs" (Vectra AI, 2023), driven in part by the repetitive, high-pressure nature of SOC work. A systematic review of the SOC literature reaches the same conclusion: analysts are "overloaded with mundane, tedious tasks", the cycle leads to burnout, and increasing automation is one of the named remedies (Vielberth et al., IEEE Access, 2020). By automating the tedious tasks and allowing analysts to focus on complex investigations, automation can improve job satisfaction and retention.
SOAR vs SIEM: What's the Difference?
SOAR and SIEM are complementary but distinct categories that are increasingly converging.
| Capability | SIEM | SOAR |
|---|---|---|
| Primary function | Collect, correlate, and analyse log data | Orchestrate, automate, and execute responses |
| Input | Raw logs and events from across the environment | Alerts from SIEM and other detection tools |
| Output | Alerts and correlated incidents | Automated enrichment, triage decisions, and response actions |
| Detection | Yes, correlation rules, analytics, ML models | No, SOAR acts on detections from other tools |
| Response | Limited, some modern SIEMs include basic automation | Core capability, playbooks execute complex response workflows |
| Case management | Basic in most SIEMs | Full incident lifecycle tracking |
| Integration depth | Primarily inbound (log ingestion) | Bidirectional (read from and write to connected tools) |
In practice, SIEM detects and SOAR responds. Many organisations deploy both, with the SIEM generating alerts that feed into the automation layer for triage and response.
However, the market is converging. Microsoft states that Sentinel, "in addition to being a SIEM system, is also a platform for security orchestration, automation, and response", with playbooks built on Azure Logic Apps (Microsoft Learn). Splunk sells Splunk SOAR (originally Phantom). Palo Alto Networks completed its acquisition of Demisto in March 2019 and now sells it as Cortex XSOAR. The trend is toward unified platforms that combine detection and response rather than requiring separate tools for each.
This convergence raises an important question for mid-market teams: if detection and response are increasingly bundled, do you need a standalone platform at all?
Do You Actually Need a Standalone SOAR?
Standalone platforms such as Cortex XSOAR, Splunk SOAR, Swimlane and Tines are powerful tools. But they come with meaningful costs and operational overhead:
Licence costs: Standalone platforms are priced for enterprise budgets. The licence is rarely the largest line, though: professional services for playbook development and the analyst time to maintain integrations usually cost more over the life of the deployment.
Integration maintenance: Every connected tool requires an integration that must be built, tested, and maintained. API changes, version upgrades, and credential rotations create ongoing maintenance work.
Playbook development: Building effective playbooks requires understanding both the security workflow and the platform's automation framework. Many organisations hire dedicated automation engineers or engage professional services. The only hands-on user study of commercial SOAR tools to date (24 participants, six products) found that "per-SOC SOAR configuration is extremely important", and that while the tools "increase efficiency and reduce context switching", this came "with potentially decreased ticketing accuracy/completeness" (Bridges et al., Computers & Security, 2023). Automation that is not configured for your environment can make investigation records worse, not better.
The paradox of automation: Playbooks automate responses to alerts, but they do not reduce the number of alerts. Analysts in the Vectra survey said "83% of these alerts are false positives and not worth their time" (Vectra AI, 2023). Peer-reviewed research agrees that the noise is real: in interviews with SOC practitioners, participants "confirmed the high FP rates of the tools used, requiring manual validation", and most of that volume was benign triggers, true alarms explained by legitimate behaviour in the environment (Alahmadi et al., USENIX Security, 2022). If your detection tools generate that kind of noise, your playbooks spend most of their execution cycles triaging it rather than responding to real threats. You are automating the wrong problem.
For large enterprises with diverse toolsets, complex multi-tier SOC structures, and dedicated automation engineers, a standalone platform delivers clear value. The investment in playbook development pays off across thousands of daily alerts and dozens of integrated tools.
For mid-market organisations with 1-3 security analysts, the calculus is different. The integration overhead, playbook maintenance, and licence costs of a standalone platform may exceed the operational capacity of the team it is meant to help. A lean team needs automation built into the detection platform, not bolted on as a separate layer.
How SenseOn Replaces Standalone SOAR
SenseOn approaches the automation problem from the opposite direction. Rather than automating the response to high volumes of low-fidelity alerts, SenseOn eliminates the low-fidelity alerts in the first place.
The cross-domain correlation, cross-validation across supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and deep learning, filters out false positives before they become cases. Only threats validated by multiple independent AI methodologies reach the analyst. This eliminates the primary use case for SOAR-style triage automation: the vast majority of alerts that turn out to be benign.
ED&F Man's experience illustrates this directly. Cyber Security Analyst John Jordan put it this way: "We managed to cut down from 40 cases a day down to about 40 a month… it massively reduces how much time we spend following false leads." Forty cases a day would typically justify a standalone automation platform to automate triage. At about 40 cases a month, there is no alert fatigue to automate away. Each case is a genuine, pre-validated threat that merits analyst attention.
For the cases that do require response, SenseOn includes native automated response capabilities:
- Endpoint isolation: quarantine compromised devices directly from the investigation console
- Network containment: block malicious communications at the network layer
- Account actions: disable compromised identities and revoke sessions
- Automated enrichment: every case arrives with pre-correlated evidence from endpoint, network, and identity telemetry
These response actions are built into the platform, not bolted on through third-party integrations. There are no connectors to maintain, no playbooks to author, and no separate licence to procure.
The SOC automation guide covers this approach in more detail, including metrics for measuring automation effectiveness.
Key SOAR Metrics to Track
Whether you deploy a standalone platform or use one with native automation, these metrics help measure the effectiveness of your automation investment. IBM's 2026 Cost of a Data Breach study puts the prize at "1.93M cost savings, in USD, from extensive use of AI and automation in security, compared to organizations using none" (IBM, 2026).
Mean Time to Respond (MTTR): The average time from alert detection to containment action. Effective automation should reduce MTTR from hours to minutes for common incident types.
Automation rate: The percentage of alerts that are fully handled by automated playbooks without analyst intervention. Mature deployments automate a large share of routine alerts, though the achievable rate depends heavily on the fidelity of the underlying alerts.
Playbook coverage: The percentage of alert types that have a corresponding automated playbook. Low coverage means analysts are still manually handling the majority of alert types.
Analyst time saved: The total analyst hours recovered through automation. This is the metric that most directly translates to ROI: if automation saves 20 hours per analyst per week, that time can be redirected to threat hunting, detection engineering, or strategic security initiatives.
False positive automation rate: The percentage of automated actions taken on alerts that turn out to be false positives. If most of your execution cycles go on auto-closing false positives, the more effective investment may be in improving detection fidelity rather than automating triage of noise.
Playbook failure rate: The percentage of playbook executions that fail due to integration errors, API timeouts, or logic errors. High failure rates indicate integration maintenance problems that erode the value of automation.
For further reading on building effective security automation, see our dedicated guide.
The Future of SOAR
The standalone market is at an inflection point. The major SIEM vendors have acquired or built SOAR capabilities. XDR platforms increasingly include automated response. The days of deploying a separate orchestration layer between detection and response tools are numbered for most mid-market organisations.
The underlying principles, orchestration, automation, and structured response, remain essential. What is changing is the delivery model. Automation is becoming a feature of detection platforms, not a separate product category.
For mid-market security teams making architectural decisions today, the question is not whether you need automation, you do, but whether that automation should come from a standalone product or from a detection platform that builds it in natively.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does SOAR stand for in cybersecurity?
SOAR stands for Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response. It is a category of security tools that connects disparate security products, automates repetitive analyst tasks through playbooks, and provides case management for incident response workflows.
What is the difference between SIEM and SOAR?
SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) collects and correlates log data to detect threats. SOAR takes action on those detections: orchestrating responses across tools, automating enrichment and triage, and managing the incident lifecycle. SIEM detects; SOAR responds. Many modern platforms now bundle both capabilities together.
Do I need a standalone SOAR platform?
Not necessarily. Standalone SOAR makes sense for large enterprises with diverse toolsets and complex workflows. For mid-market organisations, platforms like SenseOn build automation natively into the detection platform, eliminating the need for a separate SOAR product and the integration overhead it creates.
How much does a SOAR platform cost?
Standalone platforms are priced for enterprise budgets, and the licence is usually only part of the total. Professional services for playbook development, ongoing maintenance, and the analyst time required to build and keep integrations working typically add more over the life of the deployment than the licence itself.
What are SOAR playbooks?
Playbooks are predefined, automated workflows that execute a series of actions in response to specific alert types. For example, a phishing playbook might automatically extract indicators from a reported email, check them against threat intelligence, quarantine the message, and block the sender domain: all without analyst intervention.
Sources
- Microsoft, Automation in Microsoft Sentinel, updated 16 July 2025, accessed 20 September 2026
- Palo Alto Networks, Palo Alto Networks Completes Acquisition of Demisto, 28 March 2019, accessed 20 September 2026
- Splunk, Splunk SOAR product page, accessed 20 September 2026
- Palo Alto Networks, Cortex XSOAR product page, accessed 20 September 2026
- Vectra AI, 2023 State of Threat Detection, 2023, accessed 20 September 2026
- IBM, Cost of a Data Breach Report 2026, 2026, accessed 20 September 2026
- Bushra A. Alahmadi, Louise Axon, Ivan Martinovic, "99% False Positives: A Qualitative Study of SOC Analysts' Perspectives on Security Alarms", 31st USENIX Security Symposium, 2022, https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/alahmadi (open access: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec22-alahmadi.pdf)
- Robert A. Bridges, Ashley E. Rice, Sean Oesch, Jeffrey A. Nichols, Cory Watson, Kevin Spakes, Savannah Norem, Mike Huettel, Brian Jewell, Brian Weber, Connor Gannon, Olivia Bizovi, Samuel C. Hollifield, Samantha Erwin, "Testing SOAR tools in use", Computers & Security, vol. 129, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2023.103201 (open access: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.06075)
- Manfred Vielberth, Fabian Böhm, Ines Fichtinger, Günther Pernul, "Security Operations Center: A Systematic Study and Open Challenges", IEEE Access, vol. 8, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3045514 (open access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9296846)
- NIST, "Incident Response Recommendations and Considerations for Cybersecurity Risk Management: A CSF 2.0 Community Profile", NIST Special Publication 800-61 Revision 3, April 2025, https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-61r3
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