Security Operations Center - SOC

What Is SOC?

A security operations center (SOC) is a physical facility in an organization’s office where an information security monitors and analyzing an enterprise system on an ongoing basis. McAfee defines SOC as a central function within an organization that uses people, processes, and technology to continually monitor and improve an organization's security posture while preventing, detecting, analyzing, and responding to cyber incidents.

SOC teams monitor and analyze activity on websites, databases, applications, networks, servers, endpoints, and other systems. Security operations centers look for anomalous activity that could indicate a security failure. After the SOC has accurately identified and analyzed potential security incidents, it is responsible for defending, investigating, and reporting these threats.

Security operations centers must have experienced and skilled personnel along with a variety of advanced technologies. The SOCs are typically staffed with security analysts, technical investigators, and engineers, as well as managers who operate security operations.

How Does SOC Work?

The security operations center team is in charge of the ongoing, operational process of corporate information security, rather than focusing on the security strategy enhancement, the security architecture design, or protective measure implement.

SOC staff is mainly composed of security analysts working together to detect, analyze, respond, report, and prevent cybersecurity incidents. Additional capabilities of some SOCs may include advanced cryptanalysis, forensic analysis, and malware reverse engineering to investigate security threats.

SOCs team members must include;

• Manager – the leader of the team who oversees the overall security systems and procedures.
•  Analyst – the member of the team who analyzes the data periodically or after a breach.
• Investigator – the member of the team who finds out what happened and why once a breach occurs.
• Responder – the member of the team who has a range of moment-of-crisis missions that come with responding to a security breach.
• Auditor – the member of the team who ensures compliance of the organization with current and future legislation. 

Why Is SOC Needed?

The primary benefit of having a security operations center is that security incident detection is easily facilitated by continuous monitoring and analysis of data activity. By analyzing this activity around an organization's networks, endpoints, servers, and databases around the clock, it is critical to ensure that security incidents are detected and responded to on time.

 24/7 monitoring provided by a SOC gives organizations the advantage of defending against incidents and intrusions, regardless of source, time of day, or attack type. The gap between attackers’ compromise time and organizations' detection time is reported and providing SOC service to organizations helps them to close this gap and tackle the threats faced by their environment. It is also crucial that SOC personnel work closely with organizational incident response teams to ensure that security issues are quickly addressed in discovery to close the gap in time.

Unfortunately, having such a massive technology, advanced personnel, and well-organized operation procedures costs more than expected. That’s why most corporates prefer to be a business partner with a cybersecurity company that provides SOC service, rather than building such centers from scratch.