An information security team that is in charge of continuously monitoring and evaluating an organization's security posture is housed in a security operations center (SOC). The objective of the SOC team is to identify, investigate, and respond to cybersecurity issues by utilizing a range of technological solutions and a solid foundation of procedures. Security analysts, engineers, and managers who handle security operations are often employed by security operations centers. SOC personnel closely collaborate with organizational incident response teams to guarantee that security issues are dealt with as soon as they are identified.
How it work?
The SOC team is in charge of the ongoing, operational aspect of business information security rather than formulating security strategy, designing security architecture, or putting defensive measures in place. The majority of the security analysts working in the security operations center are collaborating to identify, assess, respond to, document, and prevent cybersecurity issues. Some SOCs may also be able to examine occurrences using advanced forensic analysis, cryptanalysis, and malware reverse engineering. Building a defined strategy that takes into account business-specific objectives from various departments as well as input and support from executives is the first stage in establishing an organization's SOC. The infrastructure needed to support the strategy must be put in place after it has been created.
Advantages of SOC
The improvement of security issue detection through ongoing monitoring and data activity analysis is the main advantage of having a security operations center. SOC teams are essential to ensure prompt identification and response of security issues by continuously monitoring this activity throughout an organization's networks, endpoints, servers, and databases. Organizations benefit from being able to fight against incidents and incursions regardless of the source, hour of the day, or type of attack because of a SOC's round-the-clock monitoring. According to Verizon's annual Data Breach Investigations Report, there is a significant lag between attackers' time to compromise and companies' time to discovery. Having a security operations center enables businesses to close this lag and keep up with the risks posed to their environments.
Best Practices
For optimum results, the SOC must stay current on threat intelligence and use this data to enhance internal defense and detection systems. The SOC consumes data from within the organization and correlates it with data from a variety of external sources to provide insight into threats and vulnerabilities, as the InfoSec Institute notes. This outside cyber information helps the SOC stay on top of changing cyber threats by providing news feeds, signature updates, incident reports, threat briefs, and vulnerability alerts. To stay current on threats, SOC workers must continuously provide threat intelligence to SOC monitoring systems, and the SOC must have procedures in place to distinguish between genuine threats and false positives.