When looking at any security team, one thing you might notice is that there is a tool for everything. And we do mean everything: ticketing, threat intelligence, security investigations, malware analysis, detection, incident response, advanced persistent threats, security monitoring... the list goes on.

Every organization wants the best of the best to build their defenses. This can often leave their security teams and security operations centers with a toolstack of uncooperative solutions that don't communicate with one another, with their full value remaining untapped, and they can interrupt or even cancel each other out. The team becomes paralyzed by the sheer number of alerts generated by these solutions, losing time that could be spent on contextualized investigation and response.

We often cite alert fatigue as a common challenge in SOCs, and with good reason. Nobody likes alerts, because whether it's a fire alarm, car alarm, or alarm for any other kind of emergency, it signals to us that a real threat is present. But after hearing alerts time and time again, all we hear is the boy who cried wolf. We downplay these alerts because we've spent so much of our precious time combing through them, only to reveal themselves as fake. In SOC terms, this leads to real threats being missed, often to devastating consequences.

There is a solution. That solution is connecting the tools that security teams run, to communicate with each other and do away with the tedious, time-consuming tasks that have a high potential for human error. Streamlining the process with which tools are used helps to keep security professionals from losing any of their precious time.

**Security orchestration** addresses the number of different tools used by security teams. It brings these tools together to work with one another, bringing out the full value of each and allowing teams to more effectively respond to threats.

What is security orchestration?

While we've spoken about security automation and how it differs from security orchestration, the terms are used almost interchangeably. It's important to know that even if they sound similar, they each hold a different meaning and purpose.

Let's reiterate: security automation is the automatic execution of security tasks without human intervention, and is focused on single tasks that usually follow an already established course of action. Security orchestration, on the other hand, considers the use of multiple automated tasks, and connects the technologies, tools and processes, streamlining the security process and allowing for protection combined with ease of implementation and use.

With all this in mind, we can see that automation actually takes in the more complex tasks that security orchestration involves, and that security orchestration is actually the enabler of automation.

**Security Orchestration** refers to **tools and solutions that are able to work together, communicate, share and export data in an intuitive and easy way**, without interrupting or canceling each other out, and streamlining the security process which allows each tool to be used to its full potential.

Most network threats can be caught and prevented without the need for human intervention. While in an ideal world, all solutions would come from a single vendor (making the security orchestration process much easier), that's not often the case. As we said earlier, organizations want the best tools to build their defenses with, and that often entails going to different vendors and utilizing different open source solutions. Security orchestration is more challenging when we have that kind of disparate tool situation, but should work seamlessly nonetheless.

Security orchestration presents a solution to some of the more ruinous problems that security teams face:

**Alert fatigue**: The rising number of alerts generated by the many different tools used by SOCs can lead to alert fatigue, which can compromise organizationa...