Organizations rely on their security operation center (SOC) to monitor, mitigate, and respond to cyberthreats. However, maintaining an optimal SOC poses numerous challenges. Team members must meet daily responsibilities while staying on top of the latest cybersecurity technologies and threats—frequently resulting in high costs and employee burnout. As a result, many organizations have turned to security operations center as a service providers.
Why is Security Operations Center as a Service so Valuable?
Calling a security operations center the heart of an organization’s IT security accurately describes its central role. Still, a more apt analogy for its responsibilities and functions would be the brain. Your SOC comprises the people, processes, and technology protecting your information systems. It pragmatically executes your theoretical security strategies to prevent and respond to real-world cyberthreats.
While some organizations may be reluctant to outsource such a critical component of their information security management, doing so provides a handful of apparent benefits:
- Forefront cyberthreat intelligence
- The best and most sophisticated technologies (with continuous monitoring)
- Minimized turnover (and its associated administration)
- Reclaimed SOC team bandwidth
- Cost reductions
The “as-a-Service” Trend
SOC functionality has joined the “as-a-Service” trend that has taken off in recent years for similar reasons as other core business functionalities: better results at a lower cost. Partnering with a managed security services provider (MSSP) helps achieve this universally desired outcome.
Countless organizations already outsource the execution or management of core business functionalities to “as-a-Service” vendors—from cloud computing architecture to user account provisioning to daily responsibilities, such as customer relationship management and workflow optimization software. Adding SOC responsibilities to your list of provided services allows your organization to accomplish even more with the same resources.
#1 Forefront Cyberthreat Intelligence
Two absolutes within information security are that cyberthreats continually evolve and, at some point, they will target your organization. It’s a never-ending cycle where cyberattack and mitigation techniques continually adapt to gain an advantage over the other. With your SOC team focused on crossing off its daily tasks, there are fewer working hours left to brush up on emerging threats and how to defend against them.
Managed security operations center services keep pace with the latest cybercriminal methods, so your organization is less burdened to do so. Your organization’s outsourced security services will be executed by professionals already knowledgeable about existing intrusion techniques, their characteristic indications and patterns, and those of their emerging successors.
In addition to executing outsourced functionalities, an expert MSSP can provide cybersecurity awareness training to educate your SOC team and other employees regarding the “what, where, and how” when it comes to cyberthreats. SOC-specific exercises should simulate incidents to test response processes. Even tabletop walkthroughs will prepare your organization for real, complex, and stealthy cyberattacks.
#2 The Best Security Technologies
As with the latest cyberthreats that seek to undermine your organization, MSSPs provide or help equip your SOC with the most sophisticated security technologies and monitoring tools. An expert MSSP should be able to provide advice, implementation, and ongoing management for your entire cybersecurity infrastructure, including:
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- Security information and event management (SIEM) systems – SIEM systems are the closest IT security has to a “one-stop-shop.” They aggregate and analyze logged event data and provide tools to respond to anomalous activity. A SIEM system familiarizes itself with normal network activity patterns to identify and flag abnormal occurrences. A SIEM system will provide:
- Data aggregation for logged events
- Correlation between common event attributes
- Alert notification following detected anomalies
- Dashboards that simplified management and data analysis
- Compliance report generation and monitoring
- Retained log history for long-term analysis
- Forensic analysis tools to investigate flagged incidents
- Security information and event management (SIEM) systems – SIEM systems are the closest IT security has to a “one-stop-shop.” They aggregate and analyze logged event data and provide tools to respond to anomalous activity. A SIEM system familiarizes itself with normal network activity patterns to identify and flag abnormal occurrences. A SIEM system will provide:
- Identity and access management (IAM) solutions – IAM solutions provide the foundation for managing users’ interactions with your network. They control authentication processes (i.e., logging in for identity verification) and facilitate authorization management (i.e., what systems, applications, data, and other resources users may access once authenticated).
- DNS/content filtering – Web filtering tools, such as Cisco’s Umbrella, will help prevent phishing and other cyberattacks (e.g., tricking employees into clicking on malicious links and attachments). Web filtering tools may quarantine or even change code for viruses and malware. While cost-effective, web filtering requires optimized configuration for the best deployment results, so partnering with an expert MSSP will prove beneficial.
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24/7 Monitoring
Implementing the best cybersecurity technologies only meets part of a SOC’s responsibilities, as there is no “set and forget” solution. If there were, you wouldn’t need a SOC beyond the occasional setup and configuration for systems.
Your organization’s SOC will need to conduct continuous monitoring to stay on top of potential cyberthreats as attacks occur. However, suppose you cannot afford to keep SOC staff on a constant rotation. In that case, you’ll want to consider outsourcing some (or all) monitoring responsibilities to an MSSP who can watch your IT environment 24/7.
Monitoring technologies can execute various functions without needing to eat or sleep, from vulnerability scanning in firewalls and architecture to identifying suspicious activity (e.g., repeated failed authentications, incoming traffic containing malware or viruses, internal network activity anomalies). With an MSSP partner, any incidents picked up by monitoring efforts will immediately initiate notification, detection, response, and recovery processes.
#3 Minimized SOC Turnover
Being part of a SOC team is demanding. Ponemon’s 2021-published survey, which collected responses on organizations’ SOC costs, revealed that nearly nine in ten team members consider their jobs to be “painful or very painful.” This percentage has risen since 2019’s survey. Burnout and turnover in the field aren’t simply commonplace; they’re the overwhelming expectation.
Managing the challenge of frequent employee churn places a significant burden on organizations and their SOC teams, and it falls outside of their daily responsibilities. The hiring process is neither expedient nor cheap for such an expertise-required field. SOC managers will need to set aside time to find and screen applicants while team members will be overtaxed in the interim.
Managed security operations center services alleviate these pains. With the right MSSP partner, your organization can count on tried-and-true, continuous expertise that won’t cut and run.
#4 Reclaimed SOC Team Bandwidth
Everyone has to balance competing job responsibilities and, sometimes, tasks with lower priority or longer timelines are left for “tomorrows” that never seem to turn into “today.” When burnout is the norm for SOC teams, stretching their bandwidth proves counterproductive. The right MSSP partner will not only help fill in for your SOC’s different tiered roles but will shorten everyone’s to-do list.
With reclaimed team bandwidth, you can reprioritize SOC responsibilities to tackle higher-impact tasks—and with more latitude to dedicate the time and effort that results in quality execution. Perhaps your SOC’s Tier 1 analysts are stretched too thin, and your organization could benefit from managed detection and response? If your Tier 3 threat hunter could use some help, outsourcing your penetration testing will help keep their workload manageable.
#5 Reduced SOC Costs
Managing a SOC requires significant expenditures on technology implementations and personnel. Implementing the wrong cybersecurity solution or tool will drastically affect any organization’s bottom line when purchasing a replacement (especially if the vendor requires minimum-length contracts and licensing).
From your employees’ perspective, the recorded continual salary increases that SOC team members receive year-over-year look ideal. However, organizations have reported in Ponemon’s survey that they consider their SOC’s return on investment to be dropping. 51 percent of respondents claim ROI is decreasing, which is not an insignificant jump from 2019’s 44 percent.
Respondents most often claim SOC management complexity as the reason for the perceived ROI decrease. Outsourcing security operations services will transfer some (or all) of that complexity and its associated costs onto your MSSP partner. With access to forefront cyberthreat intelligence, the best technologies, and security expertise, an MSSP will help ensure that your SOC needs are met.
Bonus Benefit: Compliance Advisory
Virtually every organization must manage compliance efforts alongside their cybersecurity. Your processes and minimum security standards partially depend on the industry-specific and business-activity-specific regulations that apply to your organization. Your SOC must map and manage various security strategies, operations, and technical specifications to ensure that they meet all of your organizations’ varying requirements (e.g., HIPAA, PCI DSS, EU GDPR).
Partnering with an MSSP experienced in compliance advisory will help your SOC manage its share of your organization’s adherence-related burdens. Performing periodic, third-party gap assessments to audit your security infrastructure will identify where your SOC team needs to concentrate its effort amongst competing compliance priorities.
Once your SOC and MSSP have identified potential noncompliance within your cybersecurity infrastructure, you can keep an eye on and remediate vulnerabilities via increased monitoring and patch deployment.
First-Class Security Operations Center as a Service
The right “as-a-Service” partner will act as a SOC service operations center and consolidate all of your outsourced functionalities to streamline security management efforts. As a cybersecurity and compliance expert, RSI Security provides all the necessary services for comprehensive SOC outsourcing and advisory.
To increase your organization’s SOC capabilities while reducing costs, consider the advantages achieved by partnering with an expert MSSP. Contact RSI Security today to learn more about our security operations center as a service offerings.
