What Is Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)?
Security information and event management (SIEM) refers to a technology platform that collects, analyzes, and correlates security data from various sources across an organization’s IT environment. SIEM tools aggregate event logs from endpoints, servers, network devices, and applications, storing them centrally for real-time monitoring and long-term analysis. By consolidating this data, SIEMs help security teams detect suspicious patterns, manage incidents, and ensure regulatory compliance by maintaining thorough audit trails.
In addition to log aggregation, SIEM platforms provide analytics and alerting features. SIEM systems leverage rule-based correlation engines, behavioral analysis, and machine learning to identify threats that might go unnoticed in isolated data silos. When a potential incident is detected, SIEMs generate alerts for investigation and response. This centralization supports forensic investigations and reporting needs, making SIEM integral to modern security operations centers (SOCs) for visibility, detection, and reporting.
What Is Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR)?
Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms extend the capabilities of SIEM platforms by automating security operations processes and orchestrating workflows across multiple tools. SOAR solutions ingest alerts and data from SIEMs and other security technologies, enabling automatic or guided task execution according to predefined playbooks. This reduces response times, minimizes manual errors, and alleviates the burden on security analysts faced with high alert volumes and repetitive tasks.
SOAR platforms emphasize structured incident response by integrating tools for case management, threat intelligence enrichment, and automated remediation actions. By codifying workflows—from triaging alerts to blocking malicious IP addresses or quarantining endpoints—SOAR helps coordinate and accelerate investigations. Its value lies in improving operational efficiency, scaling incident response, and ensuring consistent application of security procedures in organizations of any size.
SIEM vs. SOAR: The Key Differences
1. Focus and Purpose
SIEM focuses on centralized collection, normalization, and analysis of security data to provide situational awareness and alerting capabilities. Its main purpose is to identify security incidents, facilitate compliance, and provide visibility into network activity through correlation rules and dashboards. SIEM’s strength lies in detection, investigation, and reporting rather than automated action or workflow management.
SOAR automates and orchestrates operational tasks across the entire security lifecycle. Its core aim is to streamline incident response through integrations and automated playbooks. While SIEM tells you what is happening, SOAR helps decide and act on what needs to be done in response, closing the gap between detection and remediation.
2. Data Sources
SIEM tools support ingesting a wide range of structured and unstructured data sources—firewall logs, endpoint telemetry, authentication records, cloud provider events, and more. This broad data collection allows SIEMs to correlate activity across the environment and spot suspicious behavior that spans multiple data points. The effectiveness of SIEM depends strongly on the diversity and completeness of its data inputs.
SOAR platforms typically rely on data from SIEMs and specialized security tools (e.g., EDR systems, threat intelligence platforms) rather than collecting raw event data themselves. Their focus is aggregating, enriching, and acting upon alerts received via API integrations. SOAR’s success hinges on integrating tools already in the security stack, using that data to trigger workflows and automate response rather than collect evidence.
3. Human Involvement vs Automation
SIEM platforms require significant human oversight and configuration. Security analysts must develop and tune correlation rules, respond to alerts, investigate incidents, and manage reports. While SIEMs provide some automated detection, the majority of workflow activity is manual, especially triage and escalation of security events.
SOAR reduces reliance on manual tasks by automating repetitive steps within the incident response process. Through predefined playbooks, SOAR systems can automatically validate alerts, gather context, assign cases, and execute responses without direct human intervention. Analysts can then focus on exceptions, escalations, or complex decision points, which boosts efficiency and reduces fatigue.
4. Integration and Ecosystem
SIEM solutions integrate primarily with data sources, threat intelligence platforms, and reporting tools. The integration scope is generally limited to log and event collection, along with some external feeds for enrichment. SIEM connectors center around importing and standardizing disparate log types, not managing or automating operational tasks.
SOAR platforms connect and control a wide range of security and IT tools through APIs. Their integration capabilities extend to firewalls, email security, endpoint protection, ticketing systems, and more, making the SOAR ecosystem highly interconnected. This deep integration support enables orchestrated, automated workflows across functional silos.
5. Metrics and Value
SIEM platforms provide value through detection accuracy, mean time to detection (MTTD), audit trail completeness, and compliance reporting. Key performance indicators include correlated alert volumes, false positive rates, and depth of forensic investigations. The SIEM’s output is measured by its ability to improve visibility and inform incident investigation.
SOAR quantifies its impact by reducing mean time to response (MTTR), automating high-volume manual processes, and increasing analyst productivity. Metrics such as the number of automated workflows executed, incidents closed per analyst, and response consistency help demonstrate SOAR’s operational advantage. The business value lies in efficiency gains, reduced risk exposure, and improved incident resolution rates.
6. Use Cases
Common SIEM use cases include threat detection, compliance reporting, insider threat monitoring, and long-term event retention for forensics. Organizations use SIEMs to satisfy regulatory requirements, surface hidden threats, and investigate the root causes of incidents. SIEM’s extended data retention also enables historical analysis and trend reporting.
SOAR is well-suited for standardized incident response, automated phishing remediation, threat hunting operations, and orchestrating cross-tool responses. Use cases often involve automating repetitive steps such as alert validation or collecting evidence, as well as executing coordinated actions across multiple systems. SOAR platforms enable security teams to scale their operations and maintain response consistency under high alert volumes.
Unified Security: How SIEM and SOAR Work Together
SIEM and SOAR are complementary components of a modern security operations center. While SIEM provides the foundation for threat detection through log aggregation, correlation, and alerting, SOAR builds on that foundation by automating and orchestrating the response to those alerts. Together, they create a feedback loop where detection and response are closely integrated and continuously improved.
Typically, alerts generated by the SIEM are ingested by the SOAR platform, which uses predefined playbooks to automate triage, enrich the alert with context (e.g., threat intelligence, asset data), and initiate response actions such as isolating hosts or blocking IPs. This integration eliminates manual handoffs, reduces time to response, and ensures that high-fidelity alerts are handled consistently.
Over time, SOAR tools can also feed response outcomes back into the SIEM, refining detection rules and tuning alert thresholds based on real-world results. This creates a virtuous cycle of detection refinement and response optimization. By combining SIEM’s data visibility with SOAR’s execution capabilities, organizations gain a more resilient and scalable approach to threat management.
How to Choose the Right SOAR and SIEM Platform
Choosing the right SIEM and SOAR platforms requires aligning product capabilities with your organization’s operational needs, existing toolset, and maturity level. Below are key considerations to guide your selection:
- Use case fit: Prioritize platforms that align with your primary security goals. If compliance reporting and long-term log retention are top priorities, evaluate SIEM capabilities for auditing and historical analysis. For organizations focused on speeding up incident response and automating playbooks, SOAR platforms with strong workflow customization should be prioritized.
- Integration coverage: Ensure both SIEM and SOAR tools support robust integrations with your current security stack, including endpoint protection, firewalls, ticketing systems, and threat intelligence sources. Limited API compatibility can bottleneck automation and reduce the value of orchestration.
- Data handling and scalability: Assess how well the SIEM handles log volume, normalization, and storage as your environment scales. Check ingestion limits, performance under load, and pricing models for high-throughput scenarios. For SOAR, evaluate its ability to manage large alert volumes and execute workflows concurrently.
- Customizability and workflow flexibility: Look for platforms that offer flexible rule building in SIEM and customizable playbooks in SOAR. Avoid tools that restrict logic creation or require extensive vendor involvement for changes.
- Alert fidelity and noise reduction: SIEMs should offer correlation, rule tuning, and false-positive controls to maintain high alert quality. Excessive noise reduces analyst capacity and weakens SOAR automation.
- Analyst workflow and usability: Evaluate how well each platform supports analyst tasks such as case management, investigations, and dashboard-based triage. Interfaces should enable quick decisions and reduce training time.
- Security team size and maturity: Smaller teams may benefit from lightweight or bundled solutions such as XDR with integrated SIEM and SOAR. Larger or more mature SOCs may require specialized tools with deeper configurability.
- Deployment and maintenance complexity: Determine whether the platform is cloud-native, hybrid, or on-premise and the level of administrative overhead. Review deployment steps, update frequency, and availability of managed services or MSSP support.
- Vendor support and ecosystem: Check for strong vendor support, active communities, and availability of prebuilt rules and playbooks. Confirm whether the vendor provides ongoing threat content updates, integration kits, and tuning guidance.
- Cost and licensing model: Understand whether pricing is based on data volume, user count, or workflow execution. High ingestion rates or heavy automation can affect long-term cost sustainability.
Related content: Read our guide to SOAR playbooks
SIEM and SOAR Capabilities in Radiant Security’s AI SOC Platform
Radiant Security is an Agentic AI SOC platform that unifies alert triage, investigation, response, and log management in a single environment. The platform addresses traditional challenges associated with both SIEM and SOAR tools by automating security operations across the entire lifecycle and allowing teams to scale detection and response without increasing headcount. Radiant automatically resolves approximately 90% of false positive alerts, escalating only verified threats to analysts with transparent reasoning and executable response plans.
Key capabilities include:
- Agentic AI triage and investigation for all alert types, including previously unseen or low-fidelity ones.
- Transparent reasoning that shows how and why the AI reached its conclusions, helping analysts validate decisions and build trust.
- Integrated response with one-click, executable action plans that can be carried out manually or automated when appropriate.
- Log management with unlimited retention, delivered at a cost significantly lower than traditional SIEM platforms.
- AI feedback loop that allows teams to influence and adjust triage behavior using environmental context, improving accuracy over time.
Radiant provides a unified environment for handling alerts, investigations, response actions, and log data, with an emphasis on efficiency, clarity, and analyst control.
