5 Important Reasons You Need a Security Operations Centre (SOC)

Cybersecurity threats are constantly evolving, and your security defences face an ongoing struggle to keep up.

“In 93 percent of cases, an external attacker can breach an organization’s network perimeter and gain access to local network resources.”?Source: Betanews.

Read our article about?The Most Common Types of Cyber Attacks here.

As the ransomware landscape evolves rapidly, the only way your organisation can stay ahead of malicious actors is by prioritising cybersecurity. It’s crucial to monitor and analyse your security on an ongoing basis to detect, prevent and respond to threats.?

What is a SOC??

Managed SOC is a centralised location for monitoring and administrating an organisation’s security. Previously it was a physical location, like a?dedicated CCTV room on-premise, but today, it is in the cloud.?

A SOC involves security specialists, processes, and technologies to proactively monitor for malicious activity while preventing, detecting, and responding to cyber incidents across three critical attack vectors: Endpoint, Network and Cloud. The SOC team will work with your IT department on remediation when a threat is discovered. They may also contribute to developing the security strategy with their knowledge and expertise.?

The SOC is often referred to as a centralised command, covering data across a company’s IT infrastructure, spanning network devices, computers, and cloud applications. Over the last decade, the proliferation of threats has the industry adopting a layered approach to security resulting in numerous point products generating?large volumes of threat data to be monitored.

Threat detection and response

What are the benefits of a SOC?

1. Reduce cybersecurity headcount costs

Finding skilled experts and hiring internally for cyber-related positions is a difficult and costly task due to the lack of security professionals available for hire. In fact, the?Cybersecurity Workforce Study Report by (ISC)2, estimates that by 2021, the global cyber security skill shortage?would exceed 4 million vacant job openings, and when you do find one, they?won’t come cheap. Using a SOC allows immediate access to security experts with a diverse set of skills,?without the financial burden of hiring internally.?

2. Reduce dwell time & financial impact

Dwell time is the period of time an attacker goes undetected on the network after initial access has occurred. The more an attacker stays inside of the network, the greater the potential damage.?A SOC shortens the dwell time from months down to minutes.

3. 24/7 monitoring

Hackers don’t have regular office working hours, they are active around the clock. Businesses are under constant threat 24/7 and so your security team should match this. A 24/7 SOC doesn’t stop when business owners are asleep, but rather proactively hunts and monitors for threat indicators, even throughout holidays and weekends. A SOC keeps the threat radar circulating, hunting out advanced TTPs (tactic, techniques & procedures) before a breach occurs.

4. Threat triage, remediation and incident isolation

Numerous products throughout the ‘layers of security’ produce piles of threat data and security analysts perform triaging – the investigation process of determining whether a threat needs to be escalated to an incident status. Depending on your SOC, you might receive remediation guidance, a remediation solution or a combination of the two. When a threat is escalated to an incident, it’s often necessary to ‘contain’ the spread to other devices and isolate the device until the remedy is applied.

5. Security stack insight & compatibility

Most managed service providers have an existing stack of security technologies?through their?vendors. This includes firewalls, next-gen antivirus, email security, DNS, authentication, etc. A managed SOC supports your existing layers of security and delivers immediate insight across major attack vectors while consolidating the information in one single pane of glass.?

Additional benefits of a SOC service worth mentioning?

• Log management and storage retention
• Threat correlation with events and intel
• Forensic investigation capabilities
• Reduce technology stack investments
• Remote home worker threat coverage

Conclusion: A SOC augments your IT team?

Partnering with a SOC reduces the significant financial costs of hiring and retaining an internal team of cyber security personnel addressing the time overwhelming and complex challenges of triaging threats and incident investigations.