What is SOC in Cybersecurity

Over recent years, across almost all sorts of industries, data has gained tremendous significance. There’re endless benefits of keeping an entire database for the company and business to enable you to understand and improve your operations while saving time and money. Data is the main asset to understanding what your customers want and your market as well. Nevertheless, there is a risk that involves this kind of sensitive resource as hackers devise modern and complex ways of launching cyber-attacks. Mainly, companies have adopted the working from home culture due to the Corona Virus pandemic, so there has been an increment in the number of data breaches. Addressing and thwarting these kinds of threats requires a team of cybersecurity pundits referred to as Security Operation Centers (SOC).

What is SOC Security?

The security operations center involves an integrated unit that deals with first-rate IT security functions. Its function is to monitor, detect, analyze, prevent, mitigate, and react to different cyber threats. The team supervises and protects a company’s resources, such as intellectual property, private information, company systems, and brand integrity. The team plays a critical role by defending an organization against intrusions – irrespective of the source, timeline, or kind of attack through their round clock monitoring.

Roles within the Security Operations Center (SOC)

SOC framework involves various security tools and personnel who constitute the SOC team. Members of the team include a SOC manager, incident responder, forensic investigator, compliance auditor, and SOC analyst. The SOC manager manages both the personnel and budget needed to execute security solutions. The manager also coordinates with the legal team where/when necessary. An incident responder executes their duties when/where a security breach occurs. The forensic investigator commences their duty when/where a security breach takes place – by intervening. They determine and examine the evidence of “why” and “what”. The present and future laws require businesses to comply with the kind of technology they adopt. A compliance auditor’s duty is to ensure the company keeps up with the requirements and ensures that the business meets all the requirements. Finally, the SOC analyst compiles and analyzes data, either after a breach or a particular period.

Significance of SOC for your Business 

In recent years, we’ve witnessed increasing cases of cyber-attacks, creating risky grounds across different industries. To mitigate the threats, companies require advanced security technologies along with conventional ways of prevention. Indeed, there’s a need for skilled SOC pundits who can work as front-line workers to warn other experts about the trending and existing threats in the world of IT. The integration of SOC in organizations’ existing IT framework is rising across different sectors such as education systems, health care, public sector, retailing, and BFSI. Besides, all businesses that deal with data incorporate SOC in their architecture to handle potential cyber threats. Noteworthy benefits of SOC include the stock-taking of the available resources, continuous proactive monitoring, alert ranking and management, threat response, recovery and remediation, log management, root cause investigation, security refinement, preventive maintenance, asset centralization, building trust, better collaboration, and awareness maximization.

1. Asset centralization: with SOC service, you can easily get a timely and entire view of the digital architecture of the business. Through the centralized asset, it’s easy to locate/detect/identify potential cyber threats as SOC monitors it 24/7.
2. Stocktaking of the available resources: SOC is responsible for two different asset types – devices, applications, and processes charged with safeguarding and defensive tools for protection.
3. Preventive maintenance: involves actions that are laid to make attacks hard to prevail, including constant maintenance and updating of the systems, firewalls, patching vulnerabilities, blacklisting and securing applications as well as whitelisting.
4. Proactive monitoring: tools adopted by SOC scan data systems around the clock to identify any suspicious activities. Continuous monitoring allows SOC to get notifications about emerging threats and the opportunity to mitigate any harm.
5. Threat response: they are the activities/actions the majority of people think of every time they encounter the term Security Operations Center (SOC). Immediately an incident is noted, SOC behaves like the first responder and executes duties like shutting down, terminating dangerous processes, deleting malicious files, isolating endpoints, among others.
6. Recovery and remediation: should an incident occur, SOC works to restore the tempered systems and recover the lost/damaged/manipulated data. This incorporates wiping and restarting the endpoints, system reconfiguration, and deployment of viable backups and others. The whole thing is to return the system where it was before the incident happened.
7. Log management: SOC is tasked with the collection, maintenance, and review of the log of all network activities as well as communication of the whole company.
8. Root cause investigation: after an incident has occurred, SOC figures out exactly what transpired, how, and why.
9. Security refinement: hackers are constantly refining their methods and ways of infiltrating data systems. to stay ahead of them, SOC implements improvement constantly.
10. Establishes trust: Taking effective measures of data protection against theft, compromise, manipulation, or breach is a fundamental method of augmenting your brand reputation. Where the private information of clients and workers is kept safely, there is trust between them and the business. SOC offers excellent data security against any sort of cyber-security.
11. Better collaboration: the SOC team is a “club” of experts who execute their duties towards a central goal of information security. By prevention of all cyber-security-related threats and data breaches from invading the business, all departments function efficiently while maintaining synergy amongst themselves.
12. Maximizing awareness: Security Operation Center maximizes synergy, thereby minimizing the possibility of data breaches. The team enables entrepreneurs to keep their data safe from ever-innovative cyber-criminals.

Every day, in the ever-changing technology domain, innovations and strategies are structured. Consequently, entrepreneurs are faced with newer challenges in an extremely competitive environment. In this kind of situation, it’s significantly important to offer protection to personal and sensitive data to build consumers’ trust. Security Operation Center helps in achieving that goal.

Conclusion 

SOC is a new and helpful solution to data security. For best performance, it should match the latest threat intelligence to assist its identification and defense mechanisms.