SOAR vs XDR: 4 Key Differences and Using Them Together

What Are SOAR and XDR? 

SOAR, or Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response, refers to a set of technologies that enable organizations to collect inputs monitored by the security operations team, automate repetitive tasks, orchestrate security tools, and enable automated incident management. These inputs include alerts from a security information and event management (SIEM) system and other security technologies.
Extended detection and response (XDR) integrates multiple security products into a cohesive security operations platform. XDR consolidates siloed security products into a unified platform, providing detection and response capabilities across endpoints, networks, servers, and email security solutions. Its primary aim is to improve threat detection and response efficiency through deeper and broader data analysis.

Key Features of SOAR 

Orchestration and Automation

Orchestration in SOAR refers to the ability to integrate disparate security tools and data sources into one system. This integration enables the exchange of data across platforms, taking a coordinated approach to threat detection and response. By establishing standards for data sharing, devices and applications across network infrastructures can communicate more effectively.

Automation in SOAR focuses on reducing the manual effort required for routine security tasks by implementing automated workflows and playbooks. Repetitive tasks like alert triage, enrichment, and initial response actions can be conducted autonomously. This capability reduces response time and minimizes the risk of human error, allowing security teams to allocate their resources toward more complex threat analysis and strategic planning efforts.

Incident Response Capabilities

Incident response features in SOAR systems manage and mitigate the impact of security. By automating the collection of incident details and analysis, SOAR facilitates faster response times. The integration with multiple security tools enables the collection and correlation of data, helping to identify the root cause of incidents.

SOAR also supports post-incident analysis and reporting, providing insights into incident trends and patterns. This retrospection assists organizations in enhancing their future defensive measures and refining their incident response strategies. Furthermore, the automatic documentation of incidents through detailed reports ensures compliance with regulatory and industry standards.

Threat Intelligence Integration

SOAR platforms incorporate threat intelligence to enhance decision-making and improve incident response effectiveness. By aggregating threat data from external sources such as threat feeds, open-source intelligence (OSINT), and commercial threat intelligence providers, SOAR systems enrich security alerts and incidents with contextual information. This enrichment helps security teams understand the nature of threats, assess the potential impact, and prioritize responses based on the threat’s relevance and severity.

Automated threat intelligence integration enables faster detection of emerging threats, such as zero-day vulnerabilities or advanced persistent threats (APTs), by providing real-time updates. SOAR systems can also cross-reference internal logs with known threat indicators, such as malicious IP addresses or domains, enabling proactive defense measures.

Key Features of XDR 

Detection Across Multiple Layers

XDR platforms perform threat detection across various security layers beyond just endpoints, encompassing networks, servers, email, and other vectors. This multi-layered approach allows for the collection and correlation of security data from diverse sources, enabling security teams to detect and respond to threats more effectively than when managing siloed systems. By integrating data, XDR enhances cross-channel visibility and enables holistic threat identification.

The real power of XDR lies in its analytics capabilities, which aggregate, correlate, and analyze data across all monitored layers to identify patterns indicative of complex attacks. This unified view aids in detecting advanced persistent threats more efficiently, reducing dwell time.

Unified Threat Response

A primary feature of XDR is its ability to unify responses to threats detected across different environments. By centralizing threat detection and response activities within a single platform, XDR eliminates the fragmentation that happens when using multiple security solutions. This integration streamlines workflows and reduces response times, allowing security teams to deploy countermeasures quickly and effectively across the entire security spectrum.

XDR also enhances the coordination between various security components, ensuring that a threat identified in one area can precipitate a timely and coordinated response across all affected areas. Unified dashboards offer clear visibility into threats and their impacts, facilitating a cooperative and informed approach to threat management.

Threat Hunting Capabilities

XDR platforms support proactive threat hunting by offering visibility and analytics across the entire security ecosystem. Threat hunting in XDR leverages data collected from endpoints, network traffic, cloud environments, and other critical layers to search for signs of sophisticated or previously undetected threats. By consolidating and correlating this information, XDR allows security teams to uncover hidden attack vectors, lateral movements, or anomalies that might have been missed by conventional detection methods.

Advanced analytics, machine learning, and behavioral analysis integrated within XDR platforms enable security teams to identify unusual patterns or deviations from baseline behaviors, which can be indicative of an attack in progress. Additionally, XDR supports threat hunters with tools such as query-based searches, real-time dashboards, and automated threat detection mechanisms.

Tips from the expert

Steve Moore is Vice President and Chief Security Strategist at Exabeam, helping drive solutions for threat detection and advising customers on security programs and breach response. He is the host of the “The New CISO Podcast,” a Forbes Tech Council member, and Co-founder of TEN18 at Exabeam.

In my experience, here are tips that can help you make better use of SOAR and XDR solutions:

Leverage SOAR for after-action reviews: Use SOAR’s detailed post-incident documentation not only for compliance but to conduct structured after-action reviews. This practice helps identify bottlenecks in response workflows and ensures lessons learned from incidents are fed back into automated processes.

Customize playbooks to handle XDR’s advanced detections: While XDR identifies complex threats, creating custom SOAR playbooks that align with the specific TTPs uncovered by XDR can automate responses to even the most sophisticated attacks. Ensure your SOAR tool leverages these insights to trigger precise countermeasures.

Use threat hunting data to refine SOAR automations: XDR’s proactive threat hunting capabilities often surface attack patterns that may go undetected. Feed these patterns back into your SOAR system to enhance automation playbooks, especially for new and evolving attack vectors.

Develop orchestration rules for integrated systems: When deploying SOAR alongside XDR, carefully craft orchestration rules that coordinate between different security layers (e.g., endpoint, network, cloud). This ensures that a detection in one domain, like a network anomaly, triggers endpoint-level responses in real time.

Use machine learning outputs from XDR for adaptive workflows: XDR platforms use machine learning to detect anomalies, so integrate these real-time insights into SOAR workflows. This enables more dynamic playbooks that adjust based on evolving threat characteristics, ensuring quicker adaptation to unknown threats.

SOAR vs. XDR: 4 Key Differences and How to Choose 

1. Functional Differences

SOAR focuses on automating and orchestrating security processes, enabling teams to manage large volumes of alerts through workflows and playbooks. It emphasizes improving operational efficiencies and consistency in incident management. 

XDR is centered around integrating and extending detection and response capabilities across multiple security layers, offering visibility and data correlation to enhance threat detection accuracy.

While SOAR excels in process automation and reducing alert fatigue, XDR’s strength lies in its ability to synthesize data across ecosystems. These differences highlight their complementary nature; SOAR optimizes incident management efficiency and response consistency, whereas XDR broadens the scope and precision of threat detection and response capabilities.

2. Integration and Data Sources

SOAR solutions integrate various security tools and data sources to automate and orchestrate security operations. This integration capability allows it to work with SIEM systems, threat intelligence platforms, and ticketing systems, among others. By centralizing data from these disparate sources, SOAR enhances incident investigation and response times. Its open architecture supports diverse integrations, tailored to the specific needs of an organization’s security framework.

XDR also requires robust data integration, but its focus is on combining threat data from a broad range of security tools—across networks, endpoints, and cloud environments—into a unified solution. By leveraging integrated data sources, XDR provides a holistic view of the threat landscape and improves detection capabilities by correlating data streams.

3. Cost and Complexity

SOAR systems are generally more complex to implement and configure due to their need for extensive integration with a wide range of security tools, workflows, and playbooks. The initial setup and customization of automation rules can be time-consuming, requiring skilled personnel to define the processes and ensure that the orchestration of various tools is aligned with the organization’s security protocols. 

XDR is often simpler to deploy, especially when using an integrated security suite from a single vendor. XDR platforms are designed to streamline security operations by providing a consolidated view of data from various sources without needing extensive customization. While XDR can be less complex in terms of setup, it may involve higher upfront costs due to the need for advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities.

4. Target Audience

SOAR is typically aimed at large organizations with mature security operations centers (SOCs) that handle a high volume of security alerts. These organizations often have dedicated security teams responsible for managing complex incident response workflows and require a system to automate and orchestrate processes across multiple tools. SOAR is ideal for teams that prioritize operational efficiency, process standardization, and the ability to customize their security workflows based on specific organizational needs.

XDR is targeted toward organizations looking for enhanced threat detection and response capabilities across multiple security domains. It appeals to businesses that want a more holistic view of their security landscape without managing multiple point solutions independently. XDR is suited for mid-sized to large enterprises seeking to improve their detection accuracy and response time, particularly those that need to break down silos between different security tools.

Integrating SOAR and XDR for Enhanced Security 

Integrating SOAR and XDR can significantly enhance an organization’s security capabilities, as they complement each other’s strengths. SOAR can automate and orchestrate the workflows that follow threat detection, guided by the data and analysis provided by XDR. This integration leads to faster response times and streamlined operations, leveraging XDR’s insights to drive SOAR’s automated and orchestrated response actions.

Harnessing both tools enables a flow from detection to response, providing end-to-end visibility and control. XDR identifies threats through analysis across multiple layers, while SOAR executes the necessary response operations efficiently and consistently. This approach to security management not only improves incident response times but also enhances organizational resilience by continuously improving security operations through data-driven insights and automation.

Best Practices for Deploying SOAR and XDR 

Assess Organizational Needs

Before deploying SOAR and XDR solutions, it is crucial to assess the organization’s specific needs and priorities. This assessment should involve understanding the current security infrastructure, identifying gaps, and evaluating the volume and type of threats faced. By clarifying these parameters, organizations can choose solutions that align with their security goals, ensuring that deployments are tailored to address actual business requirements and existing security weaknesses.

Additionally, organizations should consider their resource availability, including staff expertise and budget constraints, in their assessments. This evaluation aids in setting realistic deployment goals and determining the level of investment necessary for training and integration.

Develop Integration Strategies

Developing a coherent integration strategy is essential for successfully deploying SOAR and XDR technologies. This strategy should outline how these tools will interact with existing security infrastructure and other IT systems. Effective integration maximizes the value of collected data and enhances the automation of threat detection and response processes. Organizations should ensure compatibility between new solutions and legacy systems to avoid disruptions and inefficiencies.

Strategic integration also involves collaboration between different IT and security teams, ensuring that all stakeholders are aligned with the deployment process. This collaboration facilitates shared understanding and support, fostering an environment where SOAR and XDR solutions can function optimally.

Invest in Training and Skill Development

Implementing SOAR and XDR successfully requires a skilled workforce capable of managing and optimizing these platforms. Organizations need to invest in continuous training programs to ensure that their security teams are proficient in using SOAR and XDR tools. Training should focus on system configuration, operation, and the development of automated workflows and playbooks tailored to meet organizational needs. Regular updates on emerging trends and features are also crucial to maintaining system efficacy.

Skill development should not be limited to technical competencies but also include cultivating analytic and strategic thinking skills necessary for leveraging the data analysis capabilities of XDR and automation potentials of SOAR. Structured training enables teams to maximize these systems’ potential, ensuring they deliver increased efficiency and effectiveness in threat management.

Evaluate Vendors Thoroughly

Choosing the right vendors is crucial for successful SOAR and XDR deployments. Thorough evaluations should be conducted to assess vendors’ capabilities, features, and support services. Key considerations should include the scalability of solutions, robustness of data integration, flexibility in customization, and efficacy in orchestrating security operations. Understanding vendor offerings through demos and pilot programs can reveal how well a solution fits organizational needs.

Vendor evaluations should also examine support and maintenance services, compliance with industry standards, and the ability to adapt to future innovations. Customer reviews and industry recognition can provide additional insights into vendor reliability and product effectiveness.

Exabeam Platform Capabilities: SIEM, UEBA, SOAR, Insider Threats, Compliance, TDIR

The Exabeam Security Operations Platform applies AI and automation to security operations workflows for a holistic approach to combating cyberthreats, delivering the most effective threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR): 

• AI-driven detections pinpoint high-risk threats by learning normal behavior of users and entities, and prioritizing threats with context-aware risk scoring. 
• Automated investigations simplify security operations, correlating disparate data to create threat timelines. 
• Playbooks document workflows and standardize activity to speed investigation and response. 
• Visualizations map coverage against the most strategic outcomes and frameworks to close data and detection gaps. 

With these capabilities, Exabeam empowers security operations teams to achieve faster, more accurate, and consistent TDIR.