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What is a SOC?

A Security Operations Centre (SOC) is a facility that houses a dedicated team responsible for maintaining and improving an organisation’s cyber security. This team, typically comprised of security analysts, engineers and incident responders, is charged with 24/7 monitoring of cloud and on-premises infrastructure, as well as the configuration and management of all deployed security technologies to detect and respond to potential security incidents on a continuous basis.

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How a SOC works

In today’s fast moving and ever-changing digital landscape, technology alone is an insufficient form of defence to protect businesses. Effective cyber security management requires a careful combination of technology, intelligence and expertise.

A Security Operations Centre (SOC) is an effective way to strike this balance, providing the full capabilities needed to maintain and improve cyber security around-the-clock. SOC staff are responsible for utilising the tools at their disposal to ensure that potential security incidents are identified as early as possible and response actions are put in place to remediate them quickly and effectively.

 

What does a SOC do?

Using a combination of prevention, detection and deception technologies, as well as aggregated threat intelligence and automated correlation and response processes, a SOC is designed to detect threats across an organisation’s environment and provide the information, analysis and guidance needed to remediate them quickly and effectively.

Functions performed by a SOC may include:
• Log management and monitoring
SIEM, IDS, EDR and other system tuning
• Triage and analysis of alarms
• Vulnerability and patch management
• Incident management and response
• Root cause and kill chain analysis
Threat hunting

Achieving a comprehensive SOC capability should be a priority for any business seeking to achieve a high level of cyber security.

 

The difficulties of building an in-house SOC

Across industries, there is a growing need for businesses to proactively hunt for and eliminate threats before they cause serious financial and reputational damage. However, the cost of setting up an in-house SOC to perform these vital functions is often beyond the means to all but the largest organisations.

Protecting your business against the latest cyber threats demands a range of technologies to block common threats, gain visibility of malicious activity across your IT environment and respond to genuine incidents when they arise. However, these tools are often costly, resource-intensive, and can quickly become obsolete. Many security systems generate a large volume of alerts, and without a specialist team dedicated to investigating and responding to them around-the-clock, it can be easy for them to get buried in the noise.

In the face of a global security skills shortage, the specialist personnel a SOC requires can be difficult to find or train, and expensive to recruit and retain. To ensure round-the-clock protection, organisations need enough staff to cover three 8-hour shifts a day, 24/7/365.

 

The benefits of outsourcing your SOC needs

A Managed SOC service is a hassle-free and cost-effective option for organisations that lack the necessary resources to build an in-house operation.

By deploying, configuring and maintaining your chosen security products and providing the security experts, threat intelligence and automated actions needed to hunt for threats 24/7, an outsourced SOC reduces the complexity of managing disparate security technologies and provides the threat notification and remediation advice needed to respond effectively to attack.

Outsourcing SOC functions to a specialist security provider relieves the stress on internal IT teams often burdened with the responsibility of maintaining security alongside other network management and maintenance tasks.

 

How Redscan can help

ThreatDetect™ is Redscan’s award-winning, outcome-focused Managed Detection and Response service. ThreatDetect helps organisations to overcome their security challenges by providing continuous threat detection and incident response as part of one affordable monthly subscription.

Our CREST-accredited SOC is manned with ‘red’ and ‘blue’ team experts trained to the highest professional standards. Our analysts and engineers combine high-fidelity telemetry from a range of network and endpoint technologies and Redscan Labs security intelligence to identify and shut down threats and breaches in their infancy.

CyberOps, our integrated cloud-architected XDR platform, is used to aggregate and communicate threat information, analysis and remediation guidance to your in-house team, all through a single pane of glass.

 

Learn more about ThreatDetect