As an independent, vendor-agnostic SOAR provider, we‘re thrilled to announce that D3 Security has been recognized for the third consecutive time as a Representative Vendor in the latest Gartner Market Guide for Security Orchestration, Automation and Response Solutions.
As many of you might know, the acronym SOAR was originally coined (by Gartner, no less) about six years ago. Since then, SOAR has matured and found its place within the cyber security tool ecosystem – and it’s been called an “indispensable capability” in MITRE’s 2022 book: 11 Strategies of a World-Class Cybersecurity Operations Center. As one of the early innovators in the space, we’ve been at the forefront of its evolution. We were the first SOAR platform to operationalize MITRE ATT&CK. Other notable feature-driven innovations include the Event Pipeline, multi-tenancy, codeless playbooks, and more. We keep innovating and adding both security and non-security use cases for enterprises and MSSPs.
We believe that our Smart SOAR platform best represents Gartner’s vision of the benefits of SOAR. With that in mind, here are our five key takeaways from the 2023 market guide:
Takeaway #1: Choose Open-Compatibility SOAR Solutions
While there are many ways of looking at the SOAR market, Gartner makes a broad distinction, categorizing commercial SOAR vendors as:
a) Ecosystem-first
Ecosystem-first vendors focus on SOAR as a feature within their product range. Despite not providing full SOAR features, these solutions support workflows that standalone SOAR tools typically offer.
b) Open-compatibility solutions
Open-compatibility providers offer vendor-neutral SOAR. They accept inputs from various security products, organizing security team workflows, and ensuring interoperability with competing vendors’ products, and are typically sold separately. In previous versions, Gartner has made a similar distinction between “product-oriented” and “broad-based” SOAR, which we’ve explained in our SOAR 101 page.
Opting for open-compatibility SOAR solutions provides several key advantages. It promotes interoperability, allowing seamless operation with diverse security products, including those from competing vendors. This vendor-neutrality offers the freedom to switch components based on ever-evolving organizational needs. Such solutions also offer broader threat coverage due to their integration capabilities, and streamline the SOC’s incident response workflows, enhancing efficiency and productivity. If you’re looking to adopt a cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA) and a more sophisticated, best-of-breed approach to your tooling, we recommend choosing open-compatibility SOAR.
Takeaway #2: SOAR Works Best For Mature SOC Teams
Gartner defines mature security teams as those who have the following attributes:
- Availability of current, operational metrics.
- Defined operational processes.
- Competent security analysts.
- Documented workflows and processes.
- Have a range of technologies that require integration.
If your SOC has these five attributes, SOAR is likely a good fit for you. This lines up with our own experiences too. We have seen successful implementations in large enterprises and MSSPs that align perfectly with Gartner’s profile of the ideal SOAR customer.
Takeaway #3: Demand Comprehensive APIs From Your Security Vendors
For organizations looking to adopt and deploy SOAR, Gartner recommends that security software buyers demand and choose vendors with comprehensive Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). As APIs play a critical role in enabling SOAR’s interaction with other security tools, software platforms, and technologies. If vendors in your ecosystem don’t provide comprehensive, well-documented APIs, then the automation and orchestration abilities of your SOAR solution could be hampered, reducing your ROI. Whether you are renewing your contract or putting out an RFP for a security tool, this is certainly worth incorporating into your evaluation criteria.
Takeaway #4: Suite-Based SOAR is Turning Off Potential Buyers
The guide includes a table of 11 SOAR acquisitions since 2020 by broader security platform providers. The guide’s authors speculate that these acquisitions may have weakened broader interest among buyers for SOAR tools. This aligns with our view that we’ve expressed before: suite-based SOAR is where innovation goes to die.
In our view, an independent, vendor-agnostic SOAR provider like D3 Security provides better value by providing a wide array of integrations and maintaining a laser-focused execution of our roadmap. If the richness of features, and the flexibility to integrate with existing security solutions are your primary concerns, Smart SOAR can help address much of the disenchantment we’ve seen from customers who switched from “Dumb SOAR” over the past year.
Read: Sick and Tired of “Dumb SOAR”? Smart SOAR Is the Answer
Takeaway #5: Vendor-Agnostic SOAR Offers the Best Value for Money
According to the guide, vendor-agnostic SOAR offers the best value when features are the main decision point, as it is designed to work well with a wide range of other security tools and systems, regardless of who manufactured or supplied them. This flexibility is especially useful in today’s highly diverse and fragmented cybersecurity landscape, where companies often use a mix of different products from various vendors. This reflects the views of many of our customers on why they picked Smart SOAR.
Decoding the Future of SOAR: D3’s Smart SOAR Advantage
As Gartner notes in the market guide, many tools offer some automation and orchestration features. However, a dedicated SOAR platform enhances the overall efficiency and relevance of these features by centrally managing them. By integrating your entire security stack, D3 Security’s Smart SOAR provides an innovative, single interface for threat detection and response. This eliminates the need to manage playbooks, investigations, enrichment, and automation across multiple tools, freeing your team to focus on high-priority tasks. Our revolutionary Event Pipeline can auto-triage hundreds of alerts every minute. It automatically normalizes, deduplicates, enriches, and dismisses alerts, freeing your team from time-consuming manual triage. Make the smart choice, and switch to Smart SOAR today.
