As more and more day-to-day tasks become digitized in today’s day and age, the chances of cyber threats and cyber attacks begin to increase slowly. This means having some sort of threat intelligence or threat management tool is very necessary.

Organizations are one of the main targets of security incidents such as data breaches or compromised data. As cyber-attacks become more and more common, cyber terrorists have become very skilled at their craft and are constantly evolving as they develop new tactics for sensitive data.

One of the best ways to combat such issues is through intrusion prevention systems or other security tools. Most security analysts suggest large corporations get a security operations center (SOC).

Many organizations are unaware of this solution or understand what a security operations center (SOC) is. A security operations center (SOC) is a centralized function inside the organization that constantly monitors an organization’s security posture and works on improving it by employing people, technology systems, and processes.

Having an entire security operations center (SOC) team The staff size of a security operations center can vary depending on how large an organization is. In most cases, larger organizations tend to have a lot of staff and personnel on their security alerts teams as they have many more chances of being targeted by potential threats.

The security staff of an organization’s security operations center must be alert at all times as they need to be on the lookout for any type of potential threat that can affect an organization’s personal data or assets so that they can instantly respond to these security threats in the initial stages to prevent any damages or losses in the future.

A security operations center (SOC) team is usually led by a SOC manager, who may be followed up by several other team members, such as analysts of various levels and incident responders. Incident responders are tasked with reacting instantly to any threat identified by the security analysts or any other members of the security operations center.

Various factors make security operations centers necessary for large organizations, and some of these can include the following;

Threat Response

Security operations centers are very well known for their exceptionally fast threat response. This means that as soon as an incident or thread has been identified and confirmed, the SOC responds instantly by performing much-needed actions to combat these threats, such as shutting down and isolating the endpoints. The SOC acts like a security guard by terminating harmful processes before they can execute on your devices. The main goal of SOC threat response is to act as effectively as possible without disrupting any business activity.

Root Cause investigation

Another important feature that makes the security operations center much better than other security measures is the ability to investigate the issues after they have been identified and eliminated. This process occurs after the SOC has confirmed and eliminated a threat before it becomes harmful. Once the threat has been eliminated, the SOC will start an analysis to identify the root cause of the issue and then continue to store and remember that issue in case of another attack. This can greatly help organizations suffering from multiple cyber attacks by one group.

Constant Proactive Monitoring

Tools used by the security operations centers have the ability to scan your company network around the clock without any interruption. These tools can efficiently identify potential cyber threats and deal with them. Moreover, since these tools are running 24/7, they have a close eye on what exactly is going on on your network and can report anything suspicious almost instantly.

Companies may use various types of tools for their security operations centers, such as SEIM tools, and many security operations centers also use advanced tools with behavior analysis capabilities.

Data Recovering Capabilities

Another feature that makes a security operations center extremely useful is that even if an attack is successfully carried out, which is a very rare case. The SOC will be able to recover any lost or missing data and restore systems; this can include reconfiguring systems and restarting endpoints. In the case where this recovery is complete, yes, successfully, the SOC will be able to return your network to the state it was in before the cyber attack or an incident.

This can be highly useful, as the productivity of the organization only slows down for a short while rather than slowing down for a longer period of time. The employees will be able to access the same data and carry out their tasks normally once the restore process has been completed properly.

Log Management

One of the main jobs of a security operations center is to constantly collect, maintain and constantly analyze all the activity that goes on through an organization network. This collected data from various applications, network endpoints, and the operating system helps define the baseline for why the activity is normal on the server. Therefore, these data logs can be used by forensics during the aftermath of an incident.

Moreover, since the logs give you an idea of what normal activity on the server looks like, it is much easier to identify if anything is out of place or if anything is going wrong.

Alerting and Management

A SOC is supposed to look at each and every threat once it has been alerted by any of the security monitoring tools. A software operations center’s job in this situation is to analyze the data carefully and identify any actual threat, whether it is aggressive or not. Moreover, the SOC also identifies and removes any false positives during this process. What this does is that it enables the SOC to identify which threats are more serious and tends to such threats urgently. Thus, decreasing the chance of any sensitive data or information of an organization being compromised.

What Makes a Security Operations Centre (SOC) Important?

While an organization may be able to operate properly without having a SOC, the chances of that happening for a long period of time are fairly low, as the organization will eventually be vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Therefore, it is recommended that organizations, especially large ones, should have a dedicated SOC to protect themselves from potential threats.

There are many different benefits that an organization can reap from having a dedicated security operations center, such as;

Continuous Protection

There is no specific time at which an organization may become a target of a cyber attack, as it can happen any time of the day or the night. This is why a SOC’s ability to provide 24/7 monitoring can be very helpful in keeping an organization safe from potential threats or malicious hackers looking to steal important company resources and data.

Most companies that do not have a security operations center often fall victim to huge cyber attacks and data breaches over the weekend. One of the most common tactics that cyber criminals may employ is that they will focus on attacking on the weekends to maximize their chances of success.

However, if the same attack is conducted on a company with a dedicated SOC, no matter the time or the day of the week, it will not go undetected because it is constantly monitored and checked.

Minimizing cyber security risk and emerging threats requires 24/7 continuous monitoring. This means an organization may have to hire various information security professionals, such as a security analyst or security engineer.

Reduced Costs

Having a stable and effective cyber security setup can often cost corporations large amounts of money, as they have to buy multiple licenses and softwares for multiple operating systems. Moreover, these licenses and softwares can end up being quite costly, as most organizations have separate security setups for separate departments.

However, having a dedicated SOC setup for a company can help save them a good deal of money as it can provide the company with one shared security platform for the entire organization. This can also help save corporation money in the long term because a cyberattack such as a ransomware attack can end up causing them millions of dollars. Therefore, a SOC setup can help protect an organization from such dangerous threats in the long term.

Improved Collaboration

As mentioned above, a security operations center m can help improve the overall efficiency of a company’s cybersecurity setup by centralizing all of the company’s personnel and security resources into one big team. If a threat were to occur and all these things were not centralized, then stopping it before it becomes serious might not be easy as it will be very hard to complete this task on time.

There are different tasks that come under the process of dealing with a security breach or other advanced threats, such as identifying, reporting, and responding to the cybersecurity incident. If these things are not centralized, then the process of communication between these tasks can slow down. Thus, slowing down the entire process and compromising network security.

When a dedicated SOC system has been established, the level of collaboration between the security personnel increases as they are eventually formed into one SCO team or multiple sco teams. This can make tasks such as monitoring the organization’s network 24/7 much more easier.

Problems Associated With SOC

While security operations centers may have a large number of benefits, there can also be a few downsides, such as;

Too Many Alerts

New security detection tools are introduced almost now and then, and organizations always have to be on their toes to constantly evolve their cybersecurity infrastructure due to cyber criminals constantly improving their methods of conducting attacks.

As these new tools keep getting added to the organization’s security operations center, it can lead to an extremely large amount of alerts, which can be fairly useless sometimes as they might report false positives and provide no proper context to the threat or what exactly is going on.

This ends up decreasing the overall amount of productivity as SOC teams end up wasting too much of their time on minor incidents and are not able to focus on larger incidents. Moreover, false positives drain time and can also waste a lot of an organization’s resources.

Lack of Personnel

Many organizations report difficulty hiring cybersecurity professionals as only a few possess the skill set to promptly identify and deal with incidents and threats and eliminate them.

This gap in the market can be one of the main reasons why some companies may find it hard to set up a dedicated security operations center for their company. While there may be many individuals who have the ability to identify and solve problems, only a few have the ability to understand them to such an extent that they can finish them quickly.

Conclusion

In conclusion, security tools are must-haves for organizations of all sizes as cyber security is very important, especially due to cyber criminals getting better at their craft. Many highly skilled security analysts recommend that organizations build a security operations center (SOC) that provides 24/7 monitoring. Moreover, other systems often fail to provide a good security architecture, as the process of identifying, analyzing, and incident response is not centralized. Thus, making SOC’s a much more viable and effective option.