Businesses and organizations look forward to integrating the latest technologies in their ventures. The ultimate aim of entrepreneurs is to build a business that benefits from every corner of the world by making themselves incredibly available online.
To ensure the safety of their data online, smart integrations of security operation centers (SOC) are being introduced that automates the protective processes with continuous accuracy.
Before we get started on how to take the effectiveness of SOC to a maximum, let us first understand what a security operations center technology is below.
What Is SOC?
A security operations center or SOC is a security tool integrated within an organization to deal with security from every aspect. It takes control of all the employees, technologies, and other systemic processes being carried out simultaneously.
It uses them to ensure a safe and secure environment for fundamental functions to operate by efficiently detecting, analyzing, and eliminating cyberattacks of all kinds. SOC acts like a control center for an organization. It takes command of all the devices, processes, and cooperation data and maintains a coherent check and balance of its accessibility.
SOC monitors the network around the clock to identify and allows authentic users to communicate freely while completely restricting the unauthorized and unconventional means through which the attackers might attempt to penetrate the security and cause an information breach.
SOC Team
The SOC team, or simply the security operations team, plays a significant role in facing the threat of cyberattacks. The security team’s main purpose is to identify potential security attacks and to act as a barrier against them at any time.
Once the attack has been restrained, it is in the hands of the SOC teams to respond and investigate and determine the intensity of such security incidents and to come up with good incident response along with evaluated security solutions to possess a better understanding and to deal with such sophisticated attacks in a better way in future.
The security team must provide their services at all times, as the information at stake is highly confidential. It may consist of the organization’s research, financial data regarding valuable assets, or an employee’s personal information. If breached, such information could be used inappropriately to harm a business’s reputation and its officials.
A security operations team is mainly led by security managers or security leaders. These security leaders overlook a group of security practitioners acting as security analysts. These SOC analysts provide their incident response reports to the manager, who furtherly forwards them to senior executives where the resolving decisions are taken, which are then implemented in the SOC operations.
Core SOC Responsibilities
We have learned and gained enough knowledge about the basic aspects of a SOC. Now we will shed some much-needed light on the core responsibilities performed by SOC within an organization.
Constant Monitoring
Using modern security tools and technology like SOAR tools helps identify the threats and effectively execute the remediation actions. SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) is an advanced tool designed to create ease for security teams to deal with cybersecurity and manage security operations 24/7 at a constant pace.
Appropriate Authentication
An essential element of security teams can recognize appropriate users. It allows access to authorized employees. On the contrary, it is responsible for denying requests for any false positives and determining the extent of such threats. It is also capable of identifying the data that was potentially targeted.
Immediate Response
The most fundamental task of a SOC is to take action as soon as possible. Once the attack is confirmed, it automatically stimulates the SOC to initiate its defense mechanism.
This involves a series of operations like reserving endpoints, eliminating unnecessary procedures, or deleting unwanted files. The frequent use of breach and attack simulation helps reduce the impact on security information to as minimum as possible.
Capable Of Swift Recovery
The impact of security incidents and the inefficiency of incident response may cause the network to suffer minor to major losses in every aspect. It is the responsibility of security operations to recover lost or compromised data.
It does so by using cloud computing and cloud security to create multiple backups, which are made readily available even when you are offline. Rebooting the endpoints to refresh the operating systems also enables the network to function as similarly as possible as it was before the cyberattack.
Offers Sustainability
SOC commences the required response and provides its service to investigate and identify the cause of such security threats. The implemented actionable guidance keeps a detailed account of the problem-causing sources. It makes sure to deal appropriately with them to prevent the same kind of issue from occurring in the future.
How To Improve The Efficiency Of SOC?
With the increasing scale of businesses worldwide, the need to improve and enhance security services is becoming a major concern for organizations. A greater approach toward the customers is going to attract a greater number of cybercrime offenders. This would increase the risk the cooperation data faces and likely cause increased instability within the security network.
Hackers and phishing attackers are coming up with efficient methods and techniques that are being introduced to disrupt security operations center teams. In terms of financial assets and resources, the cybersecurity industry has suffered massively from these security breaches in the past and has struggled to cope with the aggressiveness against them.
In recent years, with advancements in research, the SOC teams have developed mechanisms and strategies that greatly influence and improve SOC efficiency and provide a comprehensive security framework for the encrypted network.
The following are the unique security solutions that help in improving efficiencies.
Choosing The Right Team
The successful operation of a SOC is highly dependent upon its team members. The rightful heads should select a highly classified and knowledgeable team that can easily manage and maintain the operations at any time. It should be the biggest priority for a SOC team to carefully cover the entire networking platform and look after all the endpoints, even with limited resources.
Implementing Appropriate Procedures
It is found very often that the size and scale of a business keep increasing with a greater number of employees engaging with the resulting high number of customers. However, the company’s attention towards the SOC team is neglected, and the security remains the same as it was initiated in the first place.
This puts unneeded pressure on the team, which is forced to burden the security analysts with an information overload resulting in alert fatigue. The overworked analysts cannot work in such conditions and jeopardize security operations. The implementation of rightful processes is a big factor in improving the effectiveness of your SOC.
Immediate Response
An easy way to defend against the impact of cyberattacks is to reduce the time taken to respond to the threat. The immediate treatment of a security breach restricts the hackers from pondering upon multiple endpoints and prohibits them from accessing valuable information.
Reduce Impactfulness
Having a reduced time of response plays an important role in reducing the extent of the impact. Another way to minimize this loss is to classify and segregate the stored information from most important to least important. This would help the SOC team recognize the intensity of attacks and how swift and extreme the reaction should be.
Visibility
Any company that wants to enhance SOC efficiency must be aware of the SOC team regarding the organization’s operating system, machine learning, and software development to give them a better understanding. Transparency will create a better perspective for security analysts and eventually aid them in identifying potential attacks easily.
Endnote
The private network of any organization is undoubtedly its most valuable asset. Third-party interference within this network might become the unprecedented cause of a concerning ambiguity in the business, which could easily lead to financial and economic losses. The security operations center provides the utmost defense needed to tackle this intervention, and with certain measures, the efficiency of SOC can be easily maximized.