SOAR Platforms: Automating Security Operations

Part of the Cybersecurity Skills Guide — This article is one deep-dive in our complete guide series.

By HADESS Team | February 28, 2026 | Updated: February 28, 2026 | 5 min read

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms exist to solve a specific problem: SOC teams drown in repetitive tasks that follow predictable patterns. When an analyst spends 15 minutes on the same phishing email triage workflow fifty times a day, that is time and focus wasted on work a machine should handle.

What SOAR Actually Does

SOAR platforms combine three functions:

Orchestration connects your security tools through APIs. Your SIEM triggers an alert, the SOAR platform enriches the IOCs through threat intelligence feeds, queries your EDR for related activity, and pulls user details from your directory service. All of this happens automatically, delivering a pre-enriched case to the analyst instead of raw alerts.

Automation executes predefined actions without human intervention. Block an IP at the firewall, disable a compromised user account, quarantine an endpoint, submit a file hash to a sandbox — these are actions that follow clear logic and can run faster than any human.

Response provides case management and workflow tracking. Every incident gets a case with an audit trail showing what actions were taken, by whom (or by which automation), and when. This record is essential for post-incident review and regulatory compliance.

Building Effective Playbooks

Playbook design determines whether your SOAR deployment saves time or creates new problems. Start with your highest-volume, most repetitive workflows. Phishing email triage is the classic first playbook for a reason — it is high volume, follows consistent logic, and the automation steps are well-understood.

A phishing triage playbook typically:

1. Extracts URLs, attachments, sender information, and headers from the reported email 2. Checks URLs against threat intelligence and sandboxes attachments 3. Queries the mail server for other recipients of the same email 4. If malicious: quarantines the email from all inboxes, blocks the sender domain, adds IOCs to blocklists 5. If clean: notifies the reporter, closes the case 6. If uncertain: escalates to an analyst with all enrichment data pre-loaded

Start with semi-automated playbooks where the automation pauses for analyst approval before taking containment actions. Once you trust the logic, promote well-tested steps to fully automated.

Integration Architecture

SOAR value scales with the number of tools it connects. Common integrations include:

• SIEM — alert ingestion and log queries
• EDR — endpoint isolation, process killing, file retrieval
• Firewall/Proxy — IP and domain blocking
• Threat Intelligence — IOC enrichment (VirusTotal, AbuseIPDB, MISP)
• ITSM — ticket creation for remediation tasks
• Email Gateway — message quarantine and header analysis
• Identity Provider — account disablement, password reset

Each integration needs maintained API credentials, error handling for when services are unavailable, and rate limiting to avoid hammering external APIs.

Measuring SOAR Effectiveness

Track metrics that show actual operational improvement:

• Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) — how fast incidents are contained after detection
• Analyst hours saved — time automated playbooks save per week/month
• Alert-to-case ratio — how many raw alerts result in investigated cases
• Playbook execution success rate — percentage of automated runs that complete without errors

If your MTTR is not decreasing after SOAR deployment, your playbooks need work. If playbook failure rates are high, your integrations are unreliable.

Next Steps

• Evaluate your automation and orchestration skills with the skills assessment
• Explore detection and response topics in the skills library
• Check the salary calculator to see how SOAR expertise impacts earning potential

Related Guides in This Series

• CSIRT and PSIRT Operations: Building Effective Response Teams — HADESS | 2026
• Incident Response Methodology: From Detection to Recovery — HADESS | 2026
• Linux Forensics: Artifacts, Logs, and Investigation Techniques — HADESS | 2026

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HADESS Team consists of cybersecurity practitioners, hiring managers, and career strategists who have collectively spent 50+ years in the field.