[Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC)] An organization currently has IDS, firewall, and DLP systems in place. The systems administrator needs to integrate the tools in the environment to reduce response time. Which of the following should the administrator use?

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms are designed to address the exact scenario described. SOAR integrates a suite of disparate security tools, such as IDS, firewalls, and DLP systems, into a single console. It uses predefined workflows, or "playbooks," to automate and orchestrate security actions across these integrated tools. For example, upon receiving an alert from an IDS, a SOAR playbook could automatically query the firewall for related traffic, enrich the data with threat intelligence, and then instruct the firewall to block the malicious IP address, significantly reducing the manual effort and time required for incident response.

B. CWPP: A Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) is a security solution specifically designed to protect server workloads in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, not for general security tool integration and orchestration.
C. XCCDF: The Extensible Configuration Checklist Description Format (XCCDF) is a standardized language for specifying security configuration checklists. It is used for compliance and vulnerability scanning, not for automating incident response.
D. CMDB: A Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is a repository that stores information about an organization's IT assets and the relationships between them. It provides context but does not perform security automation or orchestration. ---

1. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). (2021). An Introduction to Security Orchestration

Automation

and Response (SOAR) (NISTIR 8368). U.S. Department of Commerce. Retrieved from https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8368/final.

Reference Details: Section 2

"What is SOAR?"

page 2

states

"SOAR technologies allow an organization to collect data about security threats from multiple sources and respond to the low-level security events without human assistance... SOAR tools allow for the integration of many different tools." This directly supports the use of SOAR for integrating tools like IDS and firewalls to automate responses.

2. Spring

J. (2021

May 20). A Look at Security Orchestration

Automation

and Response (SOAR). Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Blog. Retrieved from https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/a-look-at-security-orchestration-automation-and-response-soar/.

Reference Details: Paragraph 2 states

"SOAR platforms are technology solutions that enable organizations to streamline security operations in three key areas: threat and vulnerability management

incident response

and security operations automation." This confirms SOAR's role in automating incident response

which is the core requirement for reducing response time.

3. Bhatt

S.

& Santos

O. (2019). Security Operations Center - A Systematic Study and Open Challenges. IEEE Access

7

115613-115637. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2935925.

Reference Details: Section IV.A

"Security Orchestration and Automation

" page 115619

describes how SOAR platforms "integrate all the tools in a single umbrella and provide the capability to automate the response actions through playbooks." This academic source validates SOAR as the solution for integrating tools to automate actions.