What is Security Operation Center? Clear All Basic Concepts Regarding It
A Security Operation Center (or SOC) is an organized and a technical team of experts whose primary aim is to regularly improve and monitor security posture of a firm. This helps in detecting, analyzing, preventing, and responding over the Cyber threats with assistance over technology procedures and processes. It is a facility in which companies data systems like programs, data centers, networks, servers, etc., are assessed, monitored, and defended.
What is the Work of Security Operation Center?
The team under SOC takes responsibility of ongoing operational elements that deals with cloud security risks. Experts present in the security operation center do not particularly work on following platforms but, give their suggestions to enhance them:
- Developing the existing security strategy
- Designing an architecture for cloud security
- Implementing the data protective measures
Security analysts work in a collaborative manner to analyze, report on, detect, respond to, and prevent Cyber threats incidents. Advance forensic analysis, engineering of malware reverse to analyze Cyberattack, and cryptanalysis, are extra capabilities of an advanced level SOCs.
Initial step to establish a security operation center in an enterprise involves defining of a strategy. This strategy comprises of company mission and vision from several departments with support from the customer’s end. It is mandatory to implement infrastructure that is required to execute the planned strategy. A typical infrastructure of SOC involves IPS/IDS, leakage detection measures, investigations, firewalls, and a SIEM system. Appropriate technology must be applied for data collection through the information flows, system log, telemetry, and other measures. This data activity could be analyzed and correlated with staff members of SOC. By default, it is the duty of information security operation center’s technicians to supervise the networks and endpoints for vulnerabilities. This is going to help in protecting confidential data and enables organizations to follow government regulations.
What Are Security Operations Center Requirements?
It is quite expensive, difficult, and responsible work to establish and operate a SOC. Enterprises should have a valid and strong reason to do it. This might include:
- Undertaking serious responsibility to prevent confidential information of business clients
- Following the rules of an industry like PCI DSS, PII Compliance, etc.
- Comply with the government rules like GDPR, CESG GPG53, etc.
A combination of security engineers, analysts, and SOC managers leads to create a successful SOC. The professionals under information security centers are seasoned IT and network related. Usually, they are educated in cryptography, computer engineering, computer science, and network engineering, having credentials like GIAC or CISSP. At least, 2 security analysts should be there in one shift who are working faithfully on their allocated responsibilities.
Best Practices to Develop A Security Operation Center
1. List Down Responsibilities of SOC – The staff members of SOC monitors the company’s network and endpoints who are capable enough to determine potential security threats and deal with them in a prominent manner. Neither they are like help desk nor they should be mixed with sayings. This creates an undue stress, unmanageable workloads, and allow threat to weak down the network. They are the persons who are 365*24*7 available to analyze, detect, and monitor cloud enterprise data.
2. Render Correct Infrastructure for SOC – The executives of the center should collect and apply best and latest cloud information security measures in their work. The tools utilized in the information security center should be up-to-date and capable enough to render protection against Cyber threats. Following things should be availed while creating this security platform:
- Endpoint protection solutions
- Firewalls and Gateways
- Security Probes
- SIEM solutions
- Data collections tools
3. Make Selection of Trustworthy Employees – A successful SOC requires a set of talented people with variations in their expertise level and focus, comprising of:
- A hardworking analyst who monitors alert queue and senses the security health
- A sudden incident responder who performs deep research on the incidents
- An ethical hacker who knows tips and tricks to fill organization security gaps
Security Operation Center Overhauling
Daily a new thing gets innovated in today’s digital world, which simultaneously gives rise to ideas of hackers to attack in a smarter way. This means that staying stable on one and old techniques is of no worth. Security operation centers, as well as organizations, need to keep themselves updated with preventive measure against recent Cyber threats.
To compete with ongoing trends, a team of experts has to update their mission, vision, and working strategy to handle the change in SOC capabilities. Majority of SOCs start their traveling with determination over monitoring of infrastructure. This has been considered as a minimum monitoring level for all SOCs. With change in time, analysts should determine more efficient measures for tackling the known vulnerabilities and develop new solutions for fixing unknown threats.
Conclusion
An automated set of solutions are implemented and utilized in a successful security operation center. They adopt these automation measures for becoming more effective and efficient for their clients. The combination of expertise-level knowledge with automated security applications enhance the power of security and renders more effective defending schemes over Cyber threats. Several enterprises who do not have enough resources to design in-house security accomplish security tasks by going for SysTools Managed Security Service Providers. They offer a SOC like a service with all other facilities for protection against cybercrimes.
