Cyber attacks increase in number, variety, and complexity every day. Protecting against cyber attacks should be among the primary objectives for any organization. To do this, your business needs top-notch cyber security run by an information security team. Your information security team is responsible for monitoring and analyzing the security posture of your enterprise, which involves the prevention, detection, and response to cyber security incidents.
In the pre-digital world, traditional security teams would work out of a security operations center (SOC), which ordinarily would be a physical location and home base for those overseeing security operations. In the modern world, however, with so much business conducted on digital platforms, there are numerous differentiated points of entry into secure spaces accessible from all over the world. The game of securing your valuable information and systems has changed multiple times over, and as a result, the costs and expertise involved in establishing a working SOC may be inadvisable for your organization to tackle alone.
Managed SOC operations, or SOC-as-a-Service, provides you with cyber security experts who can manage your cloud environment, devices, and networks for threats around the clock. This security team often uses a security information and event management (SIEM) platform, which provides real-time analyses of security alerts and threat detection and response capabilities. To learn more about how SOC cybersecurity operations function, read below.
The responsibilities of a security expert in SOC operations includes many tasks, not least of which is monitoring the various security tools and systems they have set up. Endpoint security measures generate lots of data about network traffic, and security experts need to review the logs of the incoming data using SIEM software. These security experts also keep close tabs on the reliability of the detection and prevention software itself. If there are gaps in the logs or certain types of attacks that are slipping by firewalls or other EDR solutions, the security team will quickly notice and remedy the issue.
Actual security events and incidents are probably what most people picture SOC operations dealing with, even if a well-trained security team is able to keep breaches to a bare minimum through preventative efforts. But even remotely successful efforts by cyber criminals to assail your organization’s security infrastructure warrant rapid response and in-depth analysis. Understanding the scope of an attack, which systems were affected, the source of the incident, and most significantly, how to mitigate similar future efforts, all fall under the purview of the managed security operations center.
The previous task of analyzing security incidents connects directly to the investigation of potential threats and suspicious activities. Each new security event gives your security team the opportunity to adapt and grow to face the latest and most urgent threats. But even before an attack has occurred, managed SOC operations experts are working proactively to perform vulnerability assessments and penetration tests to identify possible attack vectors. Gathering intelligence can be especially difficult when trying to account for zero-day attacks and hitherto unknown types of cyber threats, but obtaining and organizing this critical security data is one of the core functions of a good security team.
One of the benefits of a co-managed SOC team is implicit in the name – they are both co-managed between your business leadership team and they collaborate closely with other teams to address security issues. Investing in managed SOC means your internal teams will have access to the latest security technology and training. Avoiding silos is crucial for ensuring that everyone is kept up to date and in the loop – at least everyone who needs to be, because another key caveat of collaborative security practices is that not everyone will be granted the same level of access. This best practice of limiting unnecessary exposure of sensitive information can help keep a tight lid on malicious internal actors. To learn about other challenges faced by security experts, continue to the next section.
Proactive Threat Detection and Response: SOC teams can create proactive policies to prevent future attacks by continuously monitoring suspicious activity. Identifying potential weaknesses, scanning for vulnerabilities on a regular basis, and practicing ready responses to events in real time will all allow your security teams to stay one step ahead of malicious actors. With the increased visibility and improved intelligence of EDR solutions, combined with policy enforcement of best practices like limiting access controls, and the employment of next-gen firewalls and niche anti-malware solutions, SOC teams can help effectively protect your organization’s assets.
Automation and Efficiency of Risk Management and Regulatory Compliance: One other major benefit you can expect from SOC experts is automation and efficiency. Incident responses are streamlined and manual tasks are reduced through the use of advanced analytics and automated processes. By placing your trust in technology that uses AI and pattern recognition to suss out problems, regulatory compliance will become far more streamlined, and your security experts can focus on more nuanced tasks of risk management without sacrificing the safety of your company’s valuable data.
Cost Savings: Finally, you can expect a well-run SOC to save your enterprise money by intelligently maximizing resources and reallocating expenditures by only investing in the hardware and personnel that provides top-level results. Moreover, cyber threats that might prove incredibly costly in terms of stolen information, lost productivity, and bad PR can be avoided entirely through proactive mitigation strategies. Partnering with high-quality managed SOC-as-a-Service providers like Compuquip is a surefire way to bring peace of mind to your employees and customers alike, and to face the world of threat of cyber criminals with assured confidence.
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