SOAR: Transforming Security and IT

When people hear “SOAR,” they often think of Security, Orchestration, Automation and Response, a powerful solution for streamlining security operations. But SOAR’s capabilities don’t stop there. By driving efficiency and automation in IT operations, infrastructure management and cloud optimization, SOAR empowers teams across the organization to work smarter and respond faster.

Beyond Security: Expanding SOAR’s Reach

Here are just a few ways SOAR can transform IT and operational workflows:

• Automated Patching and Updates
  • Trigger automated patching based on monitoring alerts or vulnerability scans, ensuring systems stay up to date then verify successful updates
• Resource Scaling and Cloud Cost Optimization
  • Automatically scale resources based on utilization metrics - pull data from AWS, Azure or GCP to optimize performance and automatically terminate underutilized resources to eliminate unnecessary costs
• Decommissioning and Containment
  • Shut down, restart or decommission hosts based on performance and health indicators keeping infrastructure running smoothly without human bottlenecks
• Service Restarts and Network Optimization
  • If an anomaly or performance degradation is detected, trigger a restart of critical applications or services before users even notice an issue. Additionally, dynamically re-route network traffic during incidents or optimize paths based on monitoring data, improving uptime and performance
• Incident Enrichment and Ticketing and Workflow Automation
  • Just like in security, SOAR can pull in additional logs, metrics and configuration data to add context to IT incidents, reducing investigation time and improving response accuracy as well as create tickets in ServiceNow to trigger workflows based on alerts
• Infrastructure as Code
  • Automate deployments or rollbacks based on anomaly detection, ensuring that infrastructure changes align with operational needs
• Proactive Maintenance
  • Schedule and automate routine maintenance tasks like backups, log rotations and disk cleanup keeping environments healthy with minimal manual effort
• Service Provisioning & Container Management
  • Automate provisioning, deprovisioning and scaling of services and containers based on demand, reducing waste and ensuring optimal resource allocation

Observability + Automation

SOAR isn’t just about automation - it’s about orchestration and intelligent response. Pairing it with observability data creates next-level operational efficiency:

• Monitoring
  • Detect anomalies in service latency, error rates and user impact and trigger automated playbooks
• Enrichment
  • Pull logs, system metrics, user impact data, and historical trends to provide full context
• Response
  • Notify teams via Slack, create incidents in ServiceNow or take direct action (restart, roll back, scale)

Example: If service latency spikes to 600ms affecting 30% of users, SOAR can...

• Pull logs from Splunk
• Check system metrics (CPU/memory utilization)
• Identify dependencies causing the slowdown
• Alert engineers with actionable insights
• Automatically remediate – restart services, roll back changes, or scale resources as needed

Final Thoughts

Unlock new possibilities with SOAR, an automation powerhouse that can streamline processes across IT, operations, AND security. How are you using SOAR outside of security? Let’s talk! Reach out to your account team for more information.