They should prioritise ownership, repair time, and coverage economics. If one engineer effectively owns the platform, if broken connectors take weeks to restore, or if each new use case adds more code than the team can sustainably maintain, the operating model is already out of balance.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
A playbook-heavy SOAR platform can look mature on paper while quietly concentrating operational risk. The real question is not whether automation exists, but whether the automation can be governed, repaired, and extended without a single specialist becoming the bottleneck. That matters because playbooks often encode assumptions about alert quality, connector reliability, and case routing that age quickly as the environment changes.
Security leaders also need to distinguish between orchestration volume and measurable security value. A large library of playbooks can hide duplicated logic, brittle integrations, and undocumented exceptions that make incident response slower when conditions are messy. Current guidance from sources such as the ENISA Threat Landscape consistently shows that adversaries exploit operational gaps, not just control absence, which means tooling renewal should focus on resilience as much as feature depth.
In practice, many security teams discover platform fragility only after a connector fails during a live incident, rather than through intentional testing of restore paths.
How It Works in Practice
Before renewing a SOAR platform, leaders should assess the operating model behind it, not just the product roadmap. The most useful test is whether the platform can be maintained by the SOC as a repeatable service. That means clear ownership, version-controlled playbooks, documented dependencies, and a measurable process for repairing broken integrations. If those basics are missing, renewal usually extends technical debt rather than reducing it.
Practically, the review should cover four areas:
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Ownership: identify who approves changes, who tests them, and who is accountable when a playbook misfires.
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Repair time: measure how long it takes to restore a failed connector, API call, or credential dependency.
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Coverage economics: compare the effort required to automate a use case with the reduction in analyst time or incident dwell time.
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Dependency risk: map secrets, service accounts, and third-party integrations that can interrupt automation if they expire or drift.
That last point often links SOAR renewal to non-human identity governance. Playbooks rely on machine identities, tokens, and secrets, so the renewal decision should include whether those identities are inventoried, rotated, and monitored in line with the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10. Where this is weak, automation may work in the lab but fail under routine credential churn, vendor API changes, or permissions drift. The operational goal is not more playbooks, but more reliable outcomes from the playbooks that matter most. These controls tend to break down when the SOAR stack depends on custom code owned by a single engineer because recovery becomes person-dependent rather than process-dependent.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter automation often increases maintenance overhead, requiring organisations to balance faster triage against the cost of keeping workflows healthy. That tradeoff is most visible in highly customised environments, where bespoke ticketing systems, legacy EDR integrations, or complex approval chains make standardisation difficult. In those cases, best practice is evolving rather than settled: some teams should simplify their use cases before renewal, while others may justify renewal only if the vendor can materially reduce connector drift and reduce the amount of code the SOC must own.
There is also a practical distinction between high-value automation and broad automation coverage. A platform may be perfectly adequate for a few repeatable response actions, yet poor for sprawling orchestration across multiple business units, cloud tenants, or outsourced operations. Leaders should be cautious when a vendor demo emphasizes low-code creation but does not demonstrate long-term recovery, change control, or auditability. If playbooks are tightly coupled to secrets, privileged accounts, or external APIs, renewal should also test whether identity and access controls are resilient enough to support the automation lifecycle. The right decision is often to reduce the scope of automation first, then renew only if the platform still delivers durable operational gain.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
MITRE ATT&CK and OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | GV.OV-01 | SOAR renewal should be judged by measurable security outcomes and operational oversight. |
| MITRE ATT&CK | T1078 | Playbooks often depend on accounts and credentials that attackers commonly abuse. |
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | SOAR playbooks rely on machine identities, secrets, and tokens that need governance. |
Tie platform renewal to governance metrics, incident outcomes, and service ownership before approving spend.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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