The number of cyber-attacks is on the rise despite the emergence of new tools every year. In fact, cyber security threats are expected to rise by at least 15% per year, and businesses of all sizes are at risk.
To address an evolving threat landscape, point solutions alone aren’t sufficient, as security teams are still overburdened with false positive alerts, even with the best technology and processes in place. The answer lies in reducing noise and enlisting the services of security operations experts.
In the event of an attack, prompt identification, reaction, and collaboration are critical, and businesses with a Security Operations Center are far more likely to respond successfully and efficiently.
It is, more often than not, the SOC that stands between a company and a devastating data breach.
What Is The Role of a Security Operations Centre?
The Security Operations Center’s (SOCs) primary responsibility is to detect, analyze, contain and eradicate cyber security threats and incidents. It is responsible for monitoring and protecting an organization’s critical IT assets, including networks, servers, endpoints, applications, and data.
The SOC utilizes a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system to provide real-time visibility into security events. By using data analytics, SIEM solutions correlate and identify the most probable threats based on data from multiple sources. The SOC team can then focus on the events most likely to reflect an actual attack against the system.
While a SIEM is not required to have a SOC, the result is that without it, events will go unseen while the damage gets done.
What are the Key Features of a SOC?
The SOC performs various functions, including threat detection and analysis, incident response, vulnerability management, security operations monitoring, and threat intelligence.
- Threat Detection and Analysis: The SOC monitors an organization’s IT assets for signs of cyber security threats, such as suspicious network activity, unauthorized access attempts, and malware infections. A range of security tools, including intrusion detection systems, firewalls, and antivirus software, is used to identify and analyze potential threats.
- Incident Response: When an organization suffers a cybersecurity incident, the SOC coordinates the response. Identifying the nature and scope of the incident, containing its impact, and mitigating any damage are all part of this process. A SOC’s job is also to enable IT teams to respond quickly and efficiently to incidents, including network operations, application support, and system administration.
- Vulnerability Management: Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are responsible for identifying and addressing vulnerabilities in an organization’s IT assets. This involves regularly scanning for vulnerabilities, prioritizing and implementing updates based on their impact on critical assets. Patching alone does not make a SOC, and many businesses fail because they look at vulnerability severity instead of how this allows an attack path to their critical assets.
- Security Operations Monitoring: The SOC ensures that an organization is following IT security policies and procedures. Any suspicious behavior will be detected and investigated by monitoring user activity, system logs, and network tracing.
- Threat Intelligence: To stay current on cyber security threats and trends, the SOC gathers and analyzes threat intelligence information which is used to develop proactive measures to prevent cyberattacks and strengthen an organization’s security posture.
How Do You Know a SOC is Effective?
To evaluate the effectiveness of a SOC service, regular reports and metrics should be provided by the service provider to demonstrate their effectiveness. Customer reviews, industry certifications, and incident response times can also be used to evaluate the SOC service’s effectiveness.
Additionally, an ongoing audit of your SOC service is crucial to ensure that it is functioning as it should. The audit should review the SOC’s processes, procedures, and technology to identify any weaknesses or gaps and assess the team’s skills and training to ensure they are up-to-date with the latest threats and technologies.
SOC Assurance
SOC Assurance is another independent assessment that evaluates the operational effectiveness and design of an organization’s SOC.
SOC teams are often stretched too thin with a broad portfolio, so events are missed or gaps exist. While some blind spots are caused by shortcomings in runbooks, others are the result of insufficient tooling covering a specific area of responsibility in the SOC’s toolkit.
ENHALO SOC Assurance assists SOC teams in areas that are unoptimized and unknown, resulting in an improved SOC that is constantly monitored and improved.
Choosing a SOC for Your Business
As stated before, SIEMs and SOCs work better together, but only large organizations can afford to have a fully staffed SOC and a robust SIEM. In many cases, companies, non-profit organizations, and governmental entities outsource security services in order to obtain a stronger security profile than they could achieve on their own. Outsourcing SOC functions and SIEM management is one option to consider.
A SOC that is Outsourced has the Following Benefits:
- Service Quality: The overall quality of the work is improved:
- By using outsourced expertise, you can bypass cybersecurity skill shortages and retention problems
- Internal IT operations, internal IT support, and help desks are not burdened with security events for which they are not skilled or equipped
- Experts at your fingertips – malware analysts, incident responders, and forensic engineers as needed, without the cost of full-time retention
- A service level agreement (SLA) defining performance is in place
- Outsourced SOCs are able to afford advanced tools, equipment, and talent due to their larger customer base
- Monitoring: Threat intelligence feed monitoring is one of the responsibilities of outsourced SOCs.
- Rapid Deployment: It takes time and expertise to deploy and configure tools. In comparison with in-house SOCs, outsourcing has a significantly reduced learning curve.
- Adaptability to changing needs: SOCs that are outsourced can be rapidly scaled to meet the current and future needs of organizations.
In conclusion, businesses of all sizes need to take cybersecurity seriously and implement robust security measures to protect their systems from cyber threats. A SOC service is one of the most effective ways to combat these threats.
NEXT STEPS:
- You have a SIEM in place, but no one is looking after it.
Ask ENHALO about our SOC solution to enable your SIEM to identify and alert the SOC staff about events that might indicate a security incident using correlation and statistical models. - You have no SIEM in place, and therefore, incidents are not detected.
Ask ENHALO about our SIEM solution – your security data will be filtered and prioritized, historical incidents will be recreated, and new incidents will be analyzed to detect suspicious activity and enhance security procedures. - You have a SOC and SIEM in place.
Ask ENHALO about SOC Assurance Service to mitigate the risk of missed alerts or gaps in the system; consider it as a safety net.
Our team is ready to solve your SOC challenges. Ask us today.
