Building an effective and fully functioning SOC team is essential for every organization, big or small. With today’s cyber security threats leaving no trace of familiar patterns due to their evolving sophistication, making sure that your SOC uses its full potential is of the utmost importance.
However, merely building a SOC team and investing in cyber security is not enough. You must know how to optimally utilize every resource and make sure your SOC is running in full steam. In this blog post, we will reveal how technologies such as SOAR allow you to tap into the full potential of your SOC team and vastly strengthen your cyber security posture.
The acronym SOC stands for Security Operations Center, and in short, it resembles a structure that consists of every entity that is required to monitor, analyze, and engage security protocols with the goal of maintaining optimal security against breaches and cyber attacks.
Basically, every individual that works in the SOC is a part of the SOC team, and the goal of the SOC is to detect, identify, analyze, and respond to every alert that has the potential to disrupt the integrity of the organization. And, in order to do that, SOCs use different types of resources and technology solutions.
In the process of evaluating the events in the organization, the SOC team analyze activities on:
Basically every device that is related to the organization is being monitored and analyzed. The end goal is to assess every cyber alert, provide critical analysis of every irregular activity that could suggest a security incident, and ultimately neutralize potential threats.
A SOC must always make optimal use of its resources. That includes both employees and technologies. And while human expertise is essential, the technologies used must also be up to par in order to successfully evade cyber attacks. And even though technologies such as IPS and Firewall may be enough to intercept basic attacks, they are most certainly not up to the challenge when it comes to dealing with today’s sophisticated cyber threats.
This is why SOC teams are reinforced with different types of contemporary tools that significantly empower their potential and increase their chances of effectively repelling cyber threats. Such technologies include:
Think of these tools as the arsenal soldiers would need when they go to war. Without such tools, SOC teams wouldn’t be able to tap into the full potential of their resources. It would be like sending your troops to war barehanded.
However, it should be noted that using SIEM alone will only make life more difficult for your employees. SIEM is great at detecting every irregular activity, anomaly, and potential alert that may hinder the security of the organization, but the rest of the job falls onto the shoulders of security professionals.
And, considering that some organizations pick up thousands of alerts on a daily basis with SIEM, that means that analysts will have the tedious task of going through each and every alert. What’s even more frustrating is the fact that much of those alerts end up being false positives (mislabelled threats), which makes the employees even more miserable.
This is where SOAR steps in as a vital force multiplier that basically improves the functionality of every SOC process and makes life easier for everyone on the SOC team.