Understand the Connection between SOAR and Identity Security

At Grip, we empower security teams to safeguard their identity assets and protect against cyber threats — whenever and wherever SaaS is used. In today's ever-evolving landscape, it is crucial to stay ahead of malicious actors who constantly seek to exploit identities, credentials, and access to the SaaS tools that control the digital enterprise. This is where the coordination of security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), and identity security is essential.

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Introduction

In the realm of identity security, the complexities and magnitude of threats require a holistic approach to defense. Traditional security measures are no longer sufficient in combating the sophisticated techniques employed by cybercriminals. This article delves into the synergy between SOAR and identity security, outlining their individual functionalities and exploring the benefits that arise from their integration.

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Leveraging SOAR for Efficient Incident Response

SaaS adoption is happening across all sizes and industries and runs parallel to customer’s overall cloud migration strategies. Many are drawn to the ease-of-use, scalability, and productivity of SaaS solutions — creating a wholesale transition to remote employees and modern work. These changes have pushed the identity perimeter out of sight, with a sprawling enterprise identity fabric that remains mostly invisible and unguarded.

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In today's fast-paced threat landscape, security teams must be equipped with tools that automate and streamline their incident response processes. Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms bridge the gap between SIEM and other security tools, enabling organizations to respond swiftly and effectively to security incidents.

Benefits of SOAR

• Workflow Automation: SOAR platforms automate routine tasks, allowing security teams to focus on more complex and critical activities. This leads to increased operational efficiency and reduced response times.
• Incident Orchestration: SOAR provides a centralized platform to coordinate incident response efforts across multiple teams and tools, ensuring a cohesive and coordinated response.
• Playbook Development: Security teams can develop and customize playbooks within SOAR platforms, outlining specific response procedures for different types of incidents.
• Integration Capabilities: SOAR integrates with a wide array of security tools and technologies, facilitating seamless information sharing and enabling orchestrated responses across the entire security infrastructure.

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The Significance of Identity Security

While SOAR tackles the broadest aspects of security, today’s digital enterprise must contend with the erosion of traditional controls brought about by the decentralization of identity assets in thousands of web relationships, cloud apps, zombie accounts, and compromised SaaS services.  

Identities are assets, not people. And for more than a decade, the enterprise identity fabric has been one of the most difficult attack surfaces to contain or protect.  

And every day, employees are using SaaS and creating a new, dynamic identity perimeter that is the top target of attacks. This creates an identity sprawl problem that is growing bigger moment-by-moment. Security teams are confronting these challenges with visibility to their SaaS-Identity attack surface and establishing identity-first security.  

While SIEM and SOAR tackle the broader aspects of security, it is essential not to overlook the critical role of identity security. Identity security plays a pivotal role in securing the real (identity-centric) enterprise perimeter, managing access privileges and permissions, and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, standards, and internal policies.

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Key Aspects of Identity Security

• SaaS-Identity Attack Surface Management (SIASM): SIASM consists of SaaS-Identity discovery, assessment, risk exposure and analysis, and mitigation actions to implement control through identities whenever the identity consumes a SaaS service or web app.  

• Identity Governance and Administration (IGA): IGA solutions establish centralized control over user identities, access rights, and entitlements, streamlining the management of user lifecycle and access provisioning.
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): MFA adds an additional layer of security by requiring users to provide multiple forms of verification, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
• Privileged Access Management (PAM): PAM solutions secure privileged accounts, mitigating the risk of insider threats and unauthorized access to critical systems and data.
• Single Sign-On (SSO): SSO simplifies the user authentication process by allowing users to access multiple applications and systems with a single set of credentials, enhancing convenience without compromising security.
• Identity Analytics: Identity analytics tools leverage machine learning algorithms to detect and mitigate identity-related risks and anomalies, enabling proactive identification of potential security threats.

• Compliance and Auditing: Identity security solutions assist organizations in meeting regulatory compliance requirements by providing robust auditing capabilities, user activity monitoring, and segregation of duties.

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How Grip Works with SOAR for Security Synergy

When combined, Grip and SOAR solutions are a formidable duo, enhancing an organization's ability to detect, respond to, and mitigate SaaS-Identity risk and threats effectively. Our integration of these technologies offers several advantages:

Streamline Incident Response and Identity Security Workflows

By leveraging Grip’s continuous discovery, organizations can monitor and analyze events across their enterprise identity fabric and SaaS-Identity attack surface. By detecting potential threats and identity risks in real-time, Grip enhances SOAR platforms by automating incident response procedures with key insights taken from real-world observations of identities in web relationships, ensuring rapid and consistent actions are taken to mitigate risks. SOAR solutions like Torq and Tines work with Grip’s SaaS-Identity risk insights to strengthen the overall security posture by automating remediation and mitigation actions across identities and SaaS, on-demand.  

Automate Offboarding, Remove Risky Access

The integration of Grip and SOAR solutions enables organizations to streamline employee or contractor offboarding, along with SaaS decommissioning by leveraging Tines Pages or Torq building blocks to easily offboard identities, triggering Grip workflows to revoke access to targeted SaaS, users, or both. Rapidly remediate access risk, including dangling access and zombie accounts from former users and abandoned SaaS services. Automate offboarding to remove accumulated identity risk.

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Enhanced Visibility and Analytics

Grip’s AI-powered SaaS-Identity discovery delivers more insights and relevant risks across the SaaS-Identity attack surface. Everything gets smarter by the mutual connection and orchestration with SOAR solutions. Collaborate and push context to cross-functional teams and tools, triggering intelligent action to mitigate identity risks, vulnerabilities, and exposures — or simply uncovering the business units and owners of SaaS accounts.

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Conclusion

The coordination of SOAR and identity security offers organizations a powerful combination to combat modern cyber threats — where identities and SaaS create the ultimate attack surface. By unifying discovery, response automation, and identity security and governance, organizations can proactively defend against evolving threats and safeguard their most critical digital asset — identities. Embracing this synergy empowers organizations to outrank potential adversaries in the ever-competitive cybersecurity landscape.

See Grip Live. Get started with a free SaaS-Identity Risk Assessment.  

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