What is a SOC?
A Security Operations Centre (SOC) refers to a team of IT security professionals who monitor activity across an organisation's entire IT environment 24/7, detecting and responding to cyber security incidents in real-time. With such a vast volume of data to trawl through, this process is reliant upon a stack of cyber security technologies which is managed and maintained by the SOC. The SOC also proactively reviews the IT environment and remediates any vulnerabilities found to continuously improve an organisation's security posture.
Most large organisations have their own SOC in-house but some simply do not have the resources or staff to maintain one themselves, with the latter issue perpetuated by the current ongoing skills shortage. An external SOC can seamlessly integrate with your existing security team or function as your organisation's SOC as required.
Functions of a SOC
By combining the right tools with highly-skilled security professionals to monitor and manage an organisation's entire network, a SOC is able to provide:
- 24/7 surveillance of your entire IT environment for threat detection and incident response.
- Expertise on all the cyber security technologies employed by your organisation to ensure your stack is capable of effectively resolving security incidents.
- Management of application software, including installation, updates and troubleshooting.
- Patch management and whitelisting assistance
- Deep analysis of security log data across disparate sources.
- Thorough investigation of security incidents to determine the root cause and put in place procedures and policies to prevent future breaches.
- Security policy and procedure enforcement.
- Security trend analysis, investigation and documentation.
- Provisioning for backup, storage and recovery.
How can your organisation benefit from a SOC?
Faster responses: By providing a comprehensive and centralised view of your entire infrastructure in real-time a SOC can detect, identify and remediate security incidents before they have the chance to impact your organisation. This is especially beneficial to organisations whose security team works standard business hours as cybercriminals are more likely to launch attacks after business close to maximise their chances of success. An external SOC provides highly-skilled personnel around the clock so no breaches are left unsupervised to wreak havoc in your network.
Value for money: Outsourcing a SOC removes the need to invest upfront in the resources and staff required to effectively run a security department. The SOC also continuously reviews your cyber security technologies and uses their knowledge of the market to ensure that your organisation is equipped with only the most effective tools and discontinues use of any that are un-utilised. Of course, in the longer run, a SOC prevents your organisation paying for the costs associated with a breach, including data loss and corruption, business downtime and customer defection.
Regulatory compliance: Deploying a SOC ensures your organisation is able to fulfil its regulatory responsibilities, including the prevention, remediation and auditing of any data breaches that affect your users and clients.
How COOLSPIRiT can help
We strive to help our customers save valuable time, money and resources which is why we have partnered with best-in-class SOC solutions to support organisations of all sizes with their security needs.
Contact our expert team today to learn more at 01246 454 222 or hello@coolspirit.co.uk.
