The security operations center (SOC) monitors, prevents, detects, investigates, and responds to cyber threats around the clock. SOC teams are responsible for monitoring and preserving the organization’s assets, which include intellectual property, people data, business processes, and brand integrity. The SOC team executes the organization’s entire cybersecurity strategy and serves as the focal point for collaborative efforts to monitor, assess, and defend against cyberattacks.
What Does a SOC Do?
Although the size of SOC teams varies based on the organization and industry, the majority have essentially the same tasks and responsibilities. A security operations center (SOC) is a centralized function within an organization that uses people, procedures, and technology to continually monitor and enhance a company’s security posture while preventing, detecting, analyzing, and responding to cyber incidents.
Prevention and detection: When it comes to cybersecurity, prevention always outperforms reaction. Rather than responding to threats as they occur, a SOC monitors the network continuously. This allows the SOC team to detect and block harmful activity before it does damage.
When a SOC analyst notices something odd, they gather as much information as possible for further inquiry.
Investigation: During the investigation stage, the SOC analyst examines the suspicious activity to establish the nature of the threat and how far it has penetrated the infrastructure. The security analyst examines the organization’s network and activities through the eyes of an attacker, seeking for important indicators and points of vulnerability before they are exploited.
The analyst discovers and triages various sorts of security events by knowing how attacks occur and how to respond effectively before they escalate. To conduct an effective triage, the SOC analyst combines network information with the most recent global threat intelligence, which includes specifics on attacker tools, strategies, and trends.
Response: Following the investigation, the SOC team coordinates a response to resolve the issue. As soon as an incident is confirmed, the SOC acts as the first responder, isolating endpoints, killing malicious programs, blocking them from executing, deleting files, and so on.
Following an incident, the SOC attempts to restore systems and retrieve lost or corrupted data. This may include erasing and restarting endpoints, resetting systems, or, in the case of ransomware attacks, deploying viable backups to bypass the ransomware. When completed successfully, this phase restores the network to its pre-incident state.
SOC Challenges
SOC teams must continually be one step ahead of attackers. In recent years, this has gotten increasingly challenging. Here are the top three obstacles that every SOC team faces:
Shortage of cybersecurity skills: According to Dimensional Research’s report, 53% of SOCs are experiencing difficulty hiring skilled workers. This implies that many SOC teams are understaffed and lack the sophisticated capabilities required to detect and respond to threats in a timely and efficient manner. According to the (ISC)² Workforce Study, the cybersecurity workforce requires a 145% increase to bridge the skills gap and enhance global defenses.
Too many alerts: As organizations add new threat detection techniques, the number of security warnings climbs exponentially. With security professionals already overburdened, the sheer volume of threat warnings might result in threat weariness. Furthermore, many of these alerts lack sufficient intelligence or context to warrant investigation, or they are false positives. False positives not only waste time and resources, but they can also divert teams’ attention away from legitimate situations.
Operational overhead: Many firms use a variety of disparate security systems. This requires security staff to interpret security warnings and policies between contexts, resulting in costly, complex, and inefficient security operations.
