Security Operations Center: Best Practices

As the world navigates its journey through the digital world, it is important for organisations and individuals to protect their data and privacy from external threat actors. Organisations hire or outsource their cyber security to get the best possible protection. Cybersecurity is vast, and the SOC team plays a huge role in shaping the organisation's security posture as they act as front-line defenders. Many organisations have already adopted SOC to protect themselves from advanced cyber threats. In this article, let us discuss the SOC best practices that need to be followed to maximise the efficiency of the SOC team.

Fine Tuning of Alerts:

Fine The tuning of alerts plays a major role in shaping the workload of the SOC team. The SOC Team must analyse the logs and make sure that they eliminate false positives to focus on more true positive detection use cases and detection. False positive reduction is a hands-on skill and comes only if we have a strong foundation in log analysis. Log analysis helps us understand the environment and, along with necessary discussion with the server team, network team, etc., will give us a base line of which is suspicious and which is not. Integration of threat intelligence sites with SIEM tools is a clever move, as this will reduce alert fatigue.

Balance of Work:

Balance of work is often an underrated statement within organizations. The SOC team should be filled with adequate resources to cover 24*7 shifts. At least a minimum of 8 members are needed to cover 24*7 shifts, along with weekends. Adequate work-life balance always strikes the right balance and makes a healthy team. For example, if a person or team works continuously for days to resolve a cyber security incident, organisations must provide them with adequate compensatory leaves to relieve the team from work stress. The SOC Team can also use SOAR automation to reduce or eliminate repeated tasks, which could aid the team in focusing on other important tasks.

Tools:

The SOC team is often overloaded with tools, which makes them fatigued. While monitoring different tools is important, SOC teams can integrate tools with the SIEM solution to create good-quality use cases to monitor them. Organisations must also eliminate different tools for different purposes and use tools that can provide multi-functionality within a single vendor. For example, organisations can use Microsoft Defender Suite products to have Azure AD, Defender for endpoint, Defender for identity protection, and Defender for cloud apps. The SOC Team can ingest alerts from the Defender console into SIEM and create use cases to effectively monitor them.

Outsourcing SOC:

Organisations can outsource SOC to third-party companies to get the maximum possible benefits. As discussed above, outsourcing provides the following benefits when compared to in-house SOC:

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• Third-party providers have best-in-class cyber security engineers and professionals, so organisations need not worry about getting the best resources.
• Third-party providers can provide the best possible SIEM solutions as per their customer needs and after studying their environment.
• Third-party providers can suggest the best cost optimisation options to reduce spending on cyber security without compromising the security posture of the organisation.
• Third-party providers have best-in-class detection use cases that expedite the incident response and provide world-class detection capabilities.

Conclusion:

While cyber threats continue to evolve, as cyber security analysts, we must also enhance our cyber security posture to fight against them. Organisations must invest in cyber security and stop looking into cyber security as an additional investment. Organisations can also reduce their burden by lending their cyber security services to dedicated third-party cyber security providers who not only maintain a healthy cyber security environment but also ensure to protect their clients from ever-evolving cyber threats.

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