Two of the big buzzwords in cybersecurity right now are hyperautomation and artificial intelligence (AI). Some security automation vendors have abandoned the term SOAR in order to align their products with those more exciting-sounding trends. At D3, we have continued to call our product SOAR, but we do hyperautomation and AI as well as anyone.
We recently released Ace AI, our major foray into AI-enhanced SecOps, and as far back as 2021, Gartner called D3 a representative vendor for hyperautomation in security. Here’s how D3 combines the best aspects of hyperautomation, generative AI, and SOAR in one tool.
D3 Is Hyperautomation
Unlike most categories of tools, which have clear definitions based on their capabilities, hyperautomation isn’t really a type of tool at all. Hyperautomation is best understood as the strategy of optimizing processes through maximal automation of repetitive tasks in order to achieve business benefits.
In the 2021 Emerging Technologies report in which it called D3 a representative vendor, Gartner said SOAR was one of the options in the hyperautomation toolset. The report also called out the benefits of hyperautomation for managed security service providers (MSSPs), saying that it helps them differentiate their offerings through high-value services like threat hunting and incident response. At the time, however, Gartner believed that few MSSPs had effectively enabled the principles of hyperautomation to improve their profit margins.
If hyperautomation is about automating repetitive tasks, then our Smart SOAR platform is firmly part of the hyperautomation movement. Our Event Pipeline automates the entirety of tier-one security operations, by normalizing, deduplicating, correlating, enriching, and triaging incoming alerts before they reach a human analyst.
Hyperautomation also requires end-to-end automated workflows, an area in which Smart SOAR towers over other automation tools that mostly execute simple, predetermined sequences. Smart SOAR extends automation to reporting, case management, and complex investigations.
Broad, reliable integrations are key to a hyperautomation strategy. If you are trying to automate as much as possible, you need to connect your tools so they can function as a seamless whole. Smart SOAR’s unlimited, vendor-agnostic integrations are designed and maintained by D3’s expert team, so users aren’t wasting the time saved through automation on managing their integrations.
Features like these are why D3 has succeeded in enabling profitable hyperautomation strategies at so many MSSPs and managed detection and response (MDR) firms—a goal that Gartner said in 2021 few had achieved.
D3 Is Generative AI
Some differentiate hyperautomation and other new categories of automation tools from SOAR based on their simplicity. One example being using AI to enable natural language inputs instead of complex coding. Smart SOAR eliminated the need for user coding a long time ago, but now with Ace AI, D3 is taking simplicity a giant step further.
Ace AI is Smart SOAR’s intelligent automation assistant, and its capabilities are incredible. Ace AI takes plain text inputs of the user’s needs—such as the tools involved, compliance requirements, and intended outcomes—and turns them into a complete playbook that leverages superhuman knowledge of incident response best practices, compliance, privacy, MITRE ATT&CK TTPs, and more.
In the coming months, Ace AI will be able to react to active incidents by determining what is happening and building the perfect response playbook on the fly, with no human inputs required.
Additionally, Ace AI generates incident summaries, investigation findings, analysis, and recommended actions, bringing AI to investigation and case management. It also enables natural language prompts to retrieve the perfect utility command from Smart SOAR’s library of hundreds of options.
These generative AI capabilities elevate Smart SOAR to the level of the most advanced security automation tools, whether they call themselves hyperautomation, AI-powered automation, or anything else.
See Ace AI in action: schedule a demo.
D3 Is SOAR (but Smarter)
If D3 has the best features of hyperautomation and AI, why do we still call ourselves a SOAR company? As we covered in a recent blog, we think companies are afraid of the term SOAR because Legacy SOAR tools have given SOAR a bad name. We know that Smart SOAR is much more than Legacy SOAR, so we are committed to making SOAR better instead of simply rebranding.
That means making good on the promises of SOAR, with:
- Powerful integrations across whatever stack you use
- A drag-and-drop playbook editor with a powerful engine below the surface
- Unlimited scale, so even the biggest organizations can automate the processing of every alert
- Dynamic data normalization, which streamlines playbooks by creating a standard structure for all alerts
- High-availability error-handling, so you never miss an alert
D3 is committed to solving cybersecurity’s biggest problems. Read our recent eBook to learn more about what we call Noise-Down Automation.
