Teams often overfocus on direct cost savings and underweight the operational gains that usually justify SOAR first. The report shows respondents valued reducing mean time to resolution, improving staff efficiency, and getting more from existing tools. If automation is measured only as a budget line, organisations can miss the larger benefit of faster, more reliable incident handling.
Why SOAR Is More Than a Budget Cut
SOAR is usually a force-multiplier for security operations, not just a way to shave labour costs. The point is to remove repetitive work from analysts, standardise response steps, and let teams handle more incidents with less friction. When organisations only look at licence cost versus headcount reduction, they miss the operational value that makes automation worth funding in the first place.
That matters because the return often shows up as faster triage, fewer handoff delays, and more consistent execution under pressure. The real benefit is not “doing the same work cheaper”, it is improving how quickly the team can decide, act, and recover.
What Teams Miss About Operational Value
SOAR earns its place when it improves incident handling quality as well as effort. A good use case is where an analyst repeatedly follows the same decision path, such as enriching alerts, checking context, opening tickets, or isolating obvious false positives. Automating that path can reduce mean time to resolution, improve queue throughput, and free skilled staff for higher-judgement work.
The mistake is treating automation as a pure efficiency project and ignoring the control value it adds. Consistent runbooks can reduce variation between analysts, make escalation more predictable, and preserve evidence better than ad hoc manual handling. For teams trying to justify SOAR, the question is often not “how many minutes does this save?” but “how much more reliable does the response become?”
SOAR also helps organisations get more value from existing tools. If alerts, enrichment sources, ticketing, and containment actions are already in place, orchestration can make those controls work together instead of remaining isolated capabilities. The operational gain is often cumulative: each small integration removes friction that otherwise slows response.
How to Judge Whether SOAR Is Working
The best way to assess SOAR is to compare its effect on outcomes, not just spend. Look for shorter resolution times, fewer manual handoffs, reduced analyst interruption, and better consistency in how common incidents are closed. Those indicators show whether automation is improving the operating model rather than simply replacing one labour line with another.
It also helps to separate high-volume, repeatable work from cases that still need human judgement. Tasks that are deterministic, well-instrumented, and reversible are stronger candidates for automation than edge cases, ambiguous triage, or actions with major blast radius. That distinction keeps the program practical and prevents over-automation from creating new operational risk.
Risk and Threat Considerations
When SOAR is evaluated only as a cost saver, teams can underinvest in the controls and maintenance needed to keep automations safe. Over-broad playbooks, weak approvals, or stale integrations can turn an efficiency gain into a response failure, especially if an automated action is triggered by noisy or manipulated telemetry.
Failure mechanism: The organisation optimises for labour reduction, but does not test whether the orchestration logic, permissions, and exception handling are still valid as tools, detections, and incident patterns change.
Impact: Response steps can fire too early, too broadly, or not at all, which weakens containment, creates false confidence, and can increase operational disruption during real incidents.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
NIST CSF 2.0, NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 and CIS Controls v8 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | RS.MA-1 — Incident Management | SOAR directly supports incident handling coordination and response execution. |
| DE.CM-1 — Monitoring | SOAR depends on monitored events and alert pipelines to trigger playbooks. | |
| Recommendation — Automate common response tasks to improve incident handling speed and consistency. Tie playbooks to reliable detection inputs and monitor for alert quality drift. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IR-4 — Incident Handling | SOAR operationalises incident response workflows and containment actions. |
| Recommendation — Encode repeatable incident-handling steps into tested orchestration workflows. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | CIS-17 — Incident Response Management | SOAR is a practical implementation aid for consistent incident response operations. |
| Recommendation — Use automation to standardise incident response actions and escalation paths. | ||
Practitioner Guidance
What to prioritise: Start with the highest-volume, lowest-ambiguity workflows that already have a clear human procedure. Those use cases give you the fastest signal on whether SOAR is improving analyst throughput and incident quality, not just lowering toil.
What to verify: Validate that each playbook has an owner, an approval boundary, and a rollback path. If an automated action can alter production state, the team should be able to explain when it is safe, when it is blocked, and how exceptions are handled.
Common mistake: Do not measure success only by licence replacement or analyst hours avoided. That framing usually undercounts the benefit and can also hide weak process design, where automation looks cheap but fails to improve actual response performance.
Practitioner takeaway: Treat SOAR as an operating-model improvement first and a cost-control lever second, because the strongest justification is usually faster, more reliable incident handling at scale.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- What do teams get wrong when they treat DSPM as a standalone tool?
- What do teams get wrong about ASPM when they treat it like another point security tool?
- What do healthcare teams get wrong about GRC when they treat it as a reporting tool?
- What do teams get wrong when they treat XDR as just another alerting tool?
Deepen Your Knowledge
Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on September 30, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
