Cybersecurity has become a critical issue for businesses around the world, and having a Security Operations Center (SOC) service is essential to protect all vulnerable attack surfaces. However, traditional SOCs are no longer able to cover with agility, speed and effectiveness the sophistication of today’s cyber-attacks and their constant evolution, from ransomware attacks to advanced malware and phishing. Therefore, the most effective defense approach is to have a modern SOC service in place. A modern SOC monitors and protects 24×7 against all cyber threats to which an organization is exposed, based on 3 fundamental requirements: technologies, processes and infrastructure, and people.
Technologies
Advanced security solutions and tools
There are many companies that deploy a SOC without having security solutions deployed, with the objective of obtaining visibility only of the security events of some business assets that they consider critical, for example, some specific servers. But this approach is not the right one because if a serious incident occurs in any of the assets that are not monitored by the SOC, the company will not be aware of it until the incident spreads to the monitored assets, being already too late.
If security solutions are not deployed, the following situations occur:
- Reduced ability to detect internally occurring threats.
- The ability to apply remediation actions to cyber threats is limited to disconnecting the network and local infrastructure; with a great negative impact on the business.
Therefore, first of all, it is imperative to have a high level of security with modern solutions that protect all attack surfaces and that are supported by detection and response tools such as:
- Intrusion Detection System (IDS).
- Connection point detection and response (EDR) system.
- Security Information and Event Management Systems (SIEM).
- Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) system.
- Extended and correlated detection systems on different attack surfaces such as Identities, Applications and data, devices and infrastructure (XDR).
- User and entity behavior analysis (UEBA) and machine learning (ML).
Only in this way is it possible to obtain a complete defense with a modern, intelligent and proactive SOC that is able to quickly identify, prevent and mitigate cyber threats.
Unified security platform
It is common for companies to use products and tools from different vendors, so it is necessary to also have a unified security management platform that enables the integration of all security tools and solutions. This helps to simplify the management and analysis of security data, and to provide complete visibility into enterprise systems and networks. Using security solutions that work under a single ecosystem, such as Microsoft’s cloud security solutions platform, allows us to correlate security events that affect all attack surfaces, so we have more capabilities to detect and investigate threats that may affect the organization.
2. Processes and infrastructure
Well-defined processes and scalable infrastructure
For the optimal functioning of a modern SOC, it is essential to have a robust and scalable cloud infrastructure to be able to collect, store, process and analyze large volumes of data, and to have well-defined and documented security processes and policies that establish the responsibilities and protocols to be followed to detect, respond to and mitigate security threats. Therefore, it is also important to foster collaboration between the SOC’s specialist team and other departments in the company, which can provide them with relevant information that allows them to better understand how cyber threats can impact the business in order to identify and mitigate risks much better. In addition, the SOC should coordinate with other departments to conduct incident response activities and communicate the results of security investigations to other departments.
3. Persons
Multidisciplinary team of cybersecurity experts
A modern SOC requires a multidisciplinary team of experts such as security engineers, security analysts, threat hunters, threat intelligence analysts and forensic investigators, with extensive knowledge of technologies for threat detection, prevention and analysis, artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as the tactics, techniques and procedures of the most advanced threats. Having all these internal resources available in the company is unfeasible in most cases due to high costs, lack of experience and qualified personnel, etc. Therefore, the most common and intelligent decision is to have a SOC service managed by a partner specialized in cybersecurity that provides all the necessary resources, personnel and knowledge.
Discover Max Global Defense
In Softeng we have designed a modern, intelligent and proactive SOC service, which combines Microsoft technology along with advanced security solutions themselves, to obtain and maximize a global defense against cyber threats. Discover in this DEMO the potential of our next-generation SOC to anticipate, react and respond to any cyber threat.
