What is SOC?

A security operation center (SOC) is a centralized function within an organization employing people, processes, and technology to continuously monitor and improve an organization’s security while preventing, detecting, analyzing, and responding to cybersecurity incidents including vulnerabilities like ‘hack’.

A SOC acts like the hub or central command post, taking in telemetry from across an organization’s IT infrastructure, including its networks, devices, appliances, and information stores wherever those assets reside. The increasing threats and vulnerabilities make it desirable to collect the context from diverse sources and SOC acts as a correlation point for every event logged within the organization that is being monitored. For each of these events, the SOC must decide how they will be managed and acted upon.

Are the SOCs effective?

As per a recent survey, SOCs are critical to working and performing in today’s digitized economy as a greater share of business operations, and sensitive data is brought online. Also,73 percent of the respondents view their SOCs as crucial elements of their cybersecurity strategies.

But the question remains are these SOCs really effective? the above data points towards the need of having a new way of looking at these.

The fact is that organizations invest heavily in SOCs. The annual in house spending of $2.86 m may rise to $4.44 if organization outsource to a managed security service provider(MSSP), thereby nullifying any saving accrued due to outsourcing. However, despite this huge investment, almost 50% of respondents were dissatisfied with the effectiveness of SOCs in detecting hacks.

The tips for improvement of SOCs

Given the fact that SQCs has become essential for a healthy and functioning organization that is able to counter hacks, it is imperative that factors of their performance improvements must be looked into. These are:

1. Team building: 

A team consisting of team members who are highly committed to network and technology security is the prerequisite for the effective counter to hacking. Regular training of staff, selection of experienced staff, tool integration, brainstorming sessions for capacity building need to be made mandatory.

2. Strategy formulation: 

The importance of strategy can not be underestimated. The strategy that one creates will directly influence the ability of the organization to counter hacks and also improve the speed at which remediation occurs.

3. Identification of weaknesses in SOC: 

Some common weaknesses are lack of funding, excessive workload, lack of leadership support.

Thus, SOCs can become an asset for countering hacks.