Benefits of Using a Security Operations Centre

A Security Operations Centre or SOC is an outsourced or in house system managed by real human beings that constantly monitor and improve a businesses security. The role of the SOC is to protect an organization from internal and external cyber threats. A SOC will monitor, prevent, detect, investigate and respond in real time to cyber threats. They will constantly look for ways to improve security and communicate these to your IT team. Security Alerts are immediately reviewed and isolated and the IT team is notified to jump in to assist. Every detection is documented and shared with the IT Team along with a suggested solution. The IT team can also add their documented notes on how the issue was resolved and this can be kept and shared with your management team for review and employee cybersecurity training, to improve policies and creates a log of normal and abnormal behaviors to better identify risks.

The benefits of adding a SOC manager to your organizations security stack are the ability to monitor the companies systems 24/7, not only giving the IT team regular updates should a threat occur during business off-time there is a live person attending to the issue immediately. A SOC is also being proactive to detect and mitigate risks to loss of data, weak security entry points, better processes and network threat detection. A SOC provides compliance management for your team, conducting regular audits to make sure company policies are being followed. This allows for faster incident response and cost savings. In public, government and healthcare sectors it helps comply with new regulation requirements.

While monitoring a SOC is able to identify suspicious activity that can indicate a threat actor is trying an intrusion attempt, this can look like an attempt to gain access through a company's firewall. phishing attempt, or attempts gain access to an employees MFA. Staying on top of alerts allows a SOC to help improve security before an active attack can take place and improve preventative measures. such as locking down a business by IP address so anyone outside of that range is unable to gain access.

In a very worst case scenario a SOC can assist a business step by step in remediating after a data breach. They will assist with restoring systems, recovering lost data and restoring back-ups.

When you are thinking about adding a SOC to your business security stack, Identify the areas of risk for your business to set a baseline and an operations framework that your business needs to follow such as NIST or CMMC. Your IT team will want to create a communication policy with its team to alert, document ,escalation protocols and remediation procedures. A creation of a documented Incident Response Plan that includes a wide array of security incidents. Build a team of experts that can efficiently coordinate your IT Team to improve infrastructure to protect the business from internal and external threats.

If your team needs help getting started check out some great resources from the Canadian Government : https://www.cyber.gc.ca/en/guidance/top-measures-enhance-cyber-security-small-and-medium-organizations-itsap10035