Enterprise organizations are increasingly investing, scaling up and upgrading both infrastructure and operations related to their Security Operations Centre (SOC). Let us try and understand why.
If cybersecurity is the goal of a progressive journey along with cyber defense and cyber resilience, then SOC enables and empowers the organization with monitoring, analyzing, responding, reporting, and managing cyber events and incidents. Let us dive deeper into what a SOC does? An enterprise organization and its operations rely on multitudinous assets & devices, multiple networks, servers, endpoints, databases, applications, websites, and many other systems. The list is almost endless. In summary, take away an organization’s IT, OT, and IoT infrastructure and it would be hard to imagine how the organization would operate even for a day or for a minute. The same infrastructure, therefore, becomes the much sought-after target of hacktivists, adversaries, and bad actors. They are either looking to undermine the organization’s operations for ransom, for intellectual property theft, identity theft, or any other of various possible reasons. In response to this, organizations decide to step up their overall cybersecurity posture. This involves a holistic approach to how the people, process, and technology combine their forces to provide an organization with the cyber defense and cyber resilience it needs to thwart attacks. It protects from targeted attempts as well as weeds off weaknesses and vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited.
Consider cybersecurity is not the result of a single product or a single technology. A mix of ‘Technologies’ ranging from Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), Next Generation Anti-virus (NGAV), Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW), Network Access Control systems (NAC ), Data-diodes, DPI packet inspection monitoring technologies, Secure Remote Access technologies, IAM/ PAM (Identity/ Privileged Access Management technologies), Threat hunting/ Threat Intel feeds and many more combine their deliveries to safeguard an organization’s assets and networks. But equally important are the cybersecurity guidelines and frameworks under which an organization operates. In case of an incident, what happens next? Who monitors? Who escalates? Who reports? Who investigates? Who takes action? How are all of these aligned with recommended cybersecurity guidelines and standards are important questions to answer. The ‘Processes’ which govern protocols for reporting, escalating, incident response, and remediation (IRR) are paramount. Likewise, the ‘People’ part of the equation cannot be ignored as well. The resources of the essential service are obliged to deliver the stated cybersecurity needs. Why is the information security team responsible for monitoring and analyzing an organization’s security posture on an ongoing basis?
The SOC team’s goal is to detect, analyze, and respond to cybersecurity incidents using a combination of technology solutions and a strong set of processes. Security operations centers are typically staffed with security analysts and engineers as well as managers who oversee security operations. SOC staff work closes with organizational incident response teams to ensure security issues are addressed quickly upon discovery. Security operations centers monitor and analyze activity on networks, servers, endpoints, databases, applications, websites, and other systems, looking for anomalous activity that could be indicative of a security incident or compromise. The SOC is responsible for ensuring that potential security incidents are correctly identified, analyzed, defended, investigated, and reported. The SOC is where the deliverables side of ‘people’, ‘processes’, and ‘technology’ come together to make visible the impending cyber threat, analyze the implications, initiate and deliver the remediation and/or the mitigation.
SOC Services in particular focus on the ongoing, operational component of enterprise information security. Security operations center staff consists primarily of security analysts who work together to detect, analyze, respond to, report on, and prevent cybersecurity incidents. Additional capabilities of some SOCs can include advanced forensic analysis, cryptanalysis, and malware reverse engineering to analyze incidents. Thereby it enables and empowers security incident detection and response through continuous monitoring and analysis of data activity. Many organizations outsource the SOC service component to an accomplished expert organization that can provide the SOC ‘run’. Such a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) provides outsourced monitoring and management of cybersecurity for the organization’s devices and systems.
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