Cybersecurity

Security Orchestration, Automation and Response

Overview

Security Orchestration, Automation and Response is a hands-on course that teaches you to turn noisy alerts into consistent, measurable incident workflows. You’ll normalize events from diverse sources, design resilient playbooks, and integrate the tools your SOC already uses—SIEM, EDR, cloud and identity platforms, sandboxes, threat intel, and ITSM.

The class emphasizes reliability and safety (human-in-the-loop, approvals, kill switches), operational excellence (testing, simulation, metrics), and governance (RBAC, audit trails, versioning).

By the end, you’ll have the patterns and artifacts to automate triage and accelerate response without sacrificing control.

Duration

2 Days

Who Should Take This Course

Audience

SOC/SIEM Analysts/Engineers, Incident Responders, Detection Engineers, Architect/SRE/Platform Security.

Prerequisites

Basic scripting experience (Python or similar) and familiarity with security operations data (logs, alerts, cases) are recommended. Prior exposure to SIEM or ITSM tooling is helpful but not required.

Why You Should Take This Course

Upon completing Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR), participants will be able to:

  • Map SOC workflows to SOAR capabilities and identify high-value automation opportunities
  • Design, implement, and version controlled playbooks with triggers, branching logic, SLAs, and approval gates
  • Integrate SOAR with SIEM, EDR, network sensors, cloud/identity platforms, ticketing/ITSM, and messaging tools
  • Build reliable automations with idempotency, retries/backoff, rate limiting, error handling, and auditing
  • Orchestrate enrichment and response actions (indicator triage, host isolation, credential reset, IP/domain blocking) safely and repeatably
  • Measure SOC performance with KPIs (MTTD, MTTR, precision/recall of detections), dashboards, and continuous improvement loops
  • Govern SOAR with RBAC, secrets management, change control, rollbacks, and compliance-aligned documentation

Course Outline

Security Orchestration, Automation and Response

Day 1

1. SOAR Concepts & SOC Workflow Mapping

  • Capability model, where automation helps (and where it doesn’t), selecting use cases
  • Lab: map a phishing and malware triage workflow to playbooks

2. Event Ingestion & Normalization

  • Connectors, APIs/webhooks, polling vs. streaming, schemas (common information models), deduplication and correlation
  • Lab: normalize SIEM alerts into a case schema

3. Enrichment Orchestration

  • Threat intel lookups, sandboxing, asset/identity context, evidence collection, case linking
  • Lab: build an enrichment sub-playbook with caching and error handling

4. Playbook Design Patterns

  • Triggers, branching, approvals, timers/SLAs, human-in-the-loop UX, case management integration
  • Lab: implement a phishing triage playbook with an analyst approval step

Day 2: Response, Reliability & Operations

5. Automated Response Actions

  • Host isolation/quarantine, account disable/reset, network and email controls, cloud guardrails; rollback plans
  • Lab: simulate containment with pre-checks and safe fallbacks

6. Reliability, Safety & Security of Automations

  • Idempotency, retries/backoff, circuit breakers, rate limiting, secrets management, RBAC, audit trails, kill switches
  • Lab: harden a playbook with safety gates and audit logging

7. Testing, Simulation & Metrics

  • Unit tests for playbooks, dry-runs, attack simulations, canary events; KPIs (MTTD/MTTR), dashboards, cost/benefit tracking
  • Lab: build a test harness and compute KPIs from sample incidents

8. Productionizing & Governance

  • CI/CD for playbooks, versioning and change control, documentation/runbooks, compliance alignment, post-incident reviews and continuous improvement
  • Lab: package and “deploy” a playbook with rollout/rollback steps and a runbook template
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