Security Operations Center: What is it & Why Do You Need It?

Security Operations Center (SOC) today are critical for businesses as they enhance and ensure your company’s well being and operational safety. In fact, organizations spend an average of $2.86 million annually on their in-house SOC.

SOC helps organizations analyze and study security policies to know their potential strengths and positions of weakness.

They help identify, thoroughly analyze, and essentially report the potential security loopholes on business networks, servers, databases, websites, and applications.

A security operations center uses a range of computer programs that can effectively find weaknesses to prevent breaches and minimize losses.

Here are some common SOC tools –

1. Firewalls
2. Ticketing tools
3. Threat intelligence platforms
4. Network detection and response
5. Security Information and event management (SIEM)
6. Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) SIEM, SOAR

In this blog post, we will discuss how these special cybersecurity teams can play a vital role in protecting your organization.

How a Security Operations Center Works

The SOC staff mostly shares the same roles and responsibilities. Here are the major functions they are expected to perform –

1. Assets Awareness: A Security Operations Center (SOC) needs to be well-versed with all the tools and technologies being used within the network. Sound knowledge and high awareness of the hardware and software running in the organization helps them detect threats at an early stage.

2. Behavioral Monitoring: SOC focuses on proactive measures to detect malicious activities before any irregularities occur.

3. Managing Logs and Responses: The members at a Security Operations Center can track previous actions that could have led to a confirmed breach. Therefore, a SOC always keeps track of all the communication and activity logs.

4. Alert Severity Ranking: SOC members rank threat alerts in order of severity to handle the most severe ones first.

5. Defense Development: SOC is responsible for constant surveillance on all inside operations to prevent security breaches. Teams can build an incident response plan (IRP) to defend their organization against attacks.

6. Incident Recovery: Reconfiguring, updating, and backing up systems are part of the incident recovery process to retrieve any compromised data.

7. Compliance Management: SOC team members ensure that all the regulatory compliance and organizational standards are followed while formulating business plans.

Top 4 Benefits of a Security Operations Center

Here are the top four ways a Security Operations Center can help –

1. SOCs can help you increase awareness for reducing data loss and minimizing costs that will have to be spent in recoveries.
2. SOC analysts monitor an organization’s infrastructure and data assets 24×7 to reduce cybersecurity risks.
3. SOC enables an organization to achieve centralized visibility into its network infrastructure and potential attacks.
4. A SOC brings together all the security resources and personnel under one roof to support the organization in case of a cybersecurity incident.

Types of Security Operations Center Models

1. Internal SOC: The IT and security professionals within an organization fall under this model. Team members of this model are dedicated to central cybersecurity monitoring.

2. Internal Virtual SOC: The team under this model is responsible for taking reactive measures as soon as it receives security alerts.

3. Co-managed SOC: This is a team of semi-dedicated individuals who work together in an organization to sustain security operations with a security service provider, managed by a third party.

4. Command/Global SOC: The team under this model coordinates with the groups of other SOC models sending them additional insights.

5. Fusion SOC: This model involves multiple security-focused facilities. It supervises the efforts of traditional IT and operational technology teams.

6. Outsourced Virtual SOC: This SOC model type operates remotely and acts as an independent third-party service provider.

At the Security Operations Center (SOC), along with the security models, every team member has a role to play.

Here are a few key roles and responsibilities that make an undefeated SOC team –

1. SOC Manager: They are the leaders of their organization with major responsibilities of hiring/firing, budgeting, etc. They report directly to the chief information security officer (CISO).

2. Compliance Auditor: They monitor if everyone is following security protocols. They also play a vital role in the standardization of SOC processes.

3. Incident Responder: They are the ones responsible for addressing the alerts. They rank the threats based on severity and coordinate with the concerned enterprise to start recovery.

4. SOC Analyst: They review prior incidents and examine their root cause.

5. Forensic Investigator: They are specialists who analyze attacks by preserving the digital evidence.

Best Practices to Follow at the Security Operations Center

1. Broaden the Scope: SOCs need to look at a wider scope with cloud-based systems. With every business getting digitized, all sensitive operations are exposed to greater vulnerability. Therefore, organizations should visualize and monitor new processes. Firstly, it’ll help them analyze how the cloud infrastructure interacts and secondly, they’ll be able to locate potential vulnerabilities.

2. Categorizing Critical Data: An increase in the number of events across networks will require security teams to gather all relevant data and organize it. This will help in ranking an incident according to its severity.

3. Efficient Analysis: Retrieving lost data is one thing but analyzing it with advanced capabilities goes miles ahead to keep it secure. An organization needs to have skilled people to do the job and formulate an effective plan of action.

4. Implementing SOAR: Organizations should also implement security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) processes within the cybersecurity sector. Automated tasks will lessen the human effort and fill in leakages that might occur due to manual testing.

Wrapping Up

Setting up a Security Operations Center can be quite effective in protecting an organization from potential threats and detecting them early on.

This is why 72% of organizations already believe that their SOC is key to building their cybersecurity strategy.

This is why SOC is imperative to decrease the growing security incidents.

Need Help in Maintaining a SOC Team? Talk to Us!