Security Operation Center (SOC) is defined as a facility comprising of a team of information security who monitor as well as analyze the security posture of a firm continuously. The prime objective of the SOC team is to identify, analyze, and address cybersecurity issues utilizing a set of technology solutions and a solid combination of processes.
Generally, SOCs are staffed with engineers, security analysts, and managers who look after the security operations of the organization. The staff of SOC work closely with the incident response team of the organization to ensure that all the security issues are frequently addressed upon identification.
Security operations centers analyze and monitor several activities on servers, networks, databases, endpoints, websites, applications, and other systems. Also, they look after anomalous activities that can create any security issue. The SOC takes complete responsibility for ensuring that all the security activities are properly detected, analyzed, investigated, defended, and reported.
What Does a SOC Do?
The team size of the SOC is based on the size of the industry and firm. Most of them have the same roles and responsibilities. In a firm, SOC has a critical role that processes, and utilizes technology to monitor and improvise the security posture of an organization while identifying, analyzing, preventing, and responding to cybersecurity issues.
- Detection and Prevention: It is always better to do prevention than reaction when it comes to any activities related to cybersecurity. Rather than just working on the vulnerabilities as they happen, a security operation center (SOC) performs to monitor the network all the time. Through this, the team of SOC can discover malicious actions and work to prevent them before any occurrence of damage. Whenever they find out something suspicious, they assemble the information and do an investigation to find out the solution.
- Investigation: In the investigation phase, the SOC team analyzes the suspicious actions to verify the characteristics of vulnerabilities and the extent to which they can damage the infrastructure. The analysts look after the firm’s network and ongoing operations from the viewpoint of an attacker, finding out important symptoms and exposure areas before they are subjugated.
The analyst of the SOC team discovers and performs different types of security activities by comprehending how the threats unfold, and in which way the threats can be controlled before they get out of hand. The analyst gathers information regarding the network of the firm with the latest worldwide threat intelligence that incorporates features on attacker methodologies, tools, and trends to do an efficient triage.
- Response: After doing an investigation, the team SOC coordinates with the response team to eliminate the issue. As early as a security issue occurs and is confirmed, the SOC team works as the first responder to perform activities including endpoints isolation, threats termination, prevention from deleting, executing files, and many more.
Afterward, the SOC team restores the affected systems and recovers the lost or compromised information. This may incorporate restarting and wiping endpoints, in the case of ransomware threats reconfiguring the systems, deploying important backups to avoid ransomware. When completing this phase successfully, the network returns to its prior state.
Advantages of SOC
The major benefit of having a team security operation center is the advancement of security activities identification through nonstop monitoring as well as analysis of data. By analyzing all the data across the endpoints, networks, databases, and servers of an organization around the clock, the team of SOC is very important to ensure detection in continuous intervals and respond to the security activities.
The continuous monitoring offered by SOC provides firms a benefit to defend against intrusions and incidents regardless of time, source, and attack type.
SOC Challenges
The team of SOC must stay one step forward to attackers. At this time, this thing is becoming callous. We have listed the top three difficulties that each SOC faces:
- Lack of Cybersecurity Expertise: According to the investigation done by Dimensional Research, nearly 55% of Security Operation Centre are facing challenges while hiring skilled professionals. This means that several SOC teams are in shortage of staff and lack the advanced expertise required to find out and respond to vulnerabilities in an effective and timely manner. As per studies, it is found that the cybersecurity workforce requires development by nearly 150% to fulfill the expertise gap and for superior defend organizations globally.
- So Many Alerts: For threat identification as companies introduce new tools, the number of security alerts increases continuously. The growing number of threat alerts can create threat fatigue. Furthermore, most of these alerts don’t offer enough intelligence, a situation to study, or false positives. These false positives waste time, resources, as well as distract the SOC teams from the actual incident.
- Operational Overhead: Several organizations utilize a collection of detached security tools. The reason behind this is that the security staff should be capable to translate policies and alerts between different environments, leading to complex, costly, and incompetent security operations.
Solutions of SOC Challenges
Finding out malicious activities in a network is just like finding out a small needle in a haystack. The SOC team most of the time enforced to piece together the data from different monitoring strategies and navigate through thousands of alerts. The outcome: major attacks are missed till it is too late.
To address the challenges, Laya Tech’s SOC team investigates properly and stops the attacks faster with 99% precision. It enhances the efficacy of security operations and ROI. By offering effortless access to limited threat intelligence and tools it facilitates faster and deep investigations.
Wrapping Up!
Flourishing SOCs use security automation to become more well-organized and effective. Organizations enhance their analytical power by combining expert security analysts with security automation to grow their security measures and protect from data vulnerabilities and cyber attacks. If you don’t have in-house SOC to accomplish this, you can take the help of us to fulfill your security measures.