How Does a Security Operations Center (SOC) Work?


An information security team monitors, identify, analyzes, and responds to cybersecurity issues in a security operations center (SOC), also known as an information security operations center (ISOC), often on a 24/7/365 basis.

An Information security team that is in charge of continuously monitoring and evaluating an organization's security posture is housed in a security operations center (SOC). The objective of the SOC team is to identify, investigate, and respond to cybersecurity issues by utilizing a range of technological solutions and a solid foundation of procedures. Security operations centers often employ security analysts, engineers, and managers who handle security operations.

The security team, made up of security analysts and engineers, keeps an eye on everything that happens on servers, databases, networks, applications, endpoint devices, websites, and other systems with the sole objective of identifying potential security threats and countering them as quickly as possible. They also keep an eye on relevant outside sources (like threat lists) that can have an impact on the organization's security posture.

In addition to identifying threats, a SOC must also analyze them, look into their origins, report on any vulnerabilities found, and make plans on how to avoid future occurrences of the same kind. Searching for unusual activity that might be a sign of a security incident or compromise, security operations centers to monitor and analyze activity on networks, servers, endpoints, databases, apps, websites, and other systems. The SOC is in charge of making sure that potential security issues are accurately recognized, assessed, countered, looked into, and reported.

What is the Importance of an SOC?

Organizations are suffering growing losses as a result of cyberattacks. Data breaches and cyberattacks affected billions of individuals in 2018, and consumers' trust in businesses' ability to secure their privacy and personal information was declining. Consumers are less likely to do business with compromised companies, according to nearly 70% of them, and they also believe that businesses are susceptible to hacking and cyber-attacks.

SOCs provide confidence that threats will be found and stopped in real-time, to put it simply. When viewed from a broad perspective, SOCs can −

  • Respond more quickly − Even if you have numerous locations and thousands of endpoints, the SOC offers a consolidated, comprehensive, real-time view of how the entire infrastructure is operating from a security aspect. Issues can be found, recognized, avoided, and fixed before they have a significant negative impact on the company.

  • Maintaining customer and consumer trust − is important because most people already have a low opinion of businesses and are concerned about their privacy. Building a SOC to safeguard client and consumer data can increase trust in your company. Of course, safeguarding that confidence means avoiding breaches.

  • Reduce costs − While many businesses believe establishing a SOC is expensive, the costs of a breach, such as lost or corrupted data or customer churn, are far higher. In order to prevent wasting money on useless instruments, SOC personnel will also make sure that you are utilizing the appropriate tools for your organization to the fullest extent possible.

How Does Security Operations Center Work?

The SOC team is in charge of the ongoing, operational aspect of business information security rather than formulating security strategy, designing security architecture, or putting defensive measures in place. The majority of the security analysts working in the security operations center are collaborating to identify, assess, respond to, document, and prevent cybersecurity issues. Some SOCs may also be able to examine occurrences using advanced forensic analysis, cryptanalysis, and malware reverse engineering.

Building a defined strategy that takes into account business-specific objectives from various departments as well as input and support from executives is the first stage in establishing an organization's SOC. The infrastructure needed to support the strategy must be put in place after it has been created.

A typical SOC infrastructure includes firewalls, IPS/IDS, breach detection tools, probes, and a security information and event management (SIEM) system, according to Bit4Id Chief Information Security Officer Pierluigi Paganini. So that data activity can be connected and evaluated by SOC employees, technology should be in place to collect data via data flows, packet capture, telemetry, syslog, and other techniques. In order to safeguard sensitive information and adhere to industry standards, the security operations center also keeps an eye out for vulnerabilities on networks and endpoints.

Benefits of Having a Security Operations Center

The improvement of security issue detection through ongoing monitoring and data activity analysis is the main advantage of having a security operations center. SOC teams are essential to ensure prompt identification and response of security issues by continuously monitoring this activity throughout an organization's networks, endpoints, servers, and databases.

Organizations benefit from being able to fight against incidents and incursions regardless of the source, hour of the day, or type of attack because of a SOC's round-the-clock monitoring. According to Verizon's annual Data Breach Investigations Report, there is a significant lag between attackers' time to compromise and enterprises' time to detection. Having a security operations center enables businesses to close this lag and keep up with the threats posed to their environments.

Updated on: 05-Aug-2022

332 Views

Kickstart Your Career

Get certified by completing the course

Get Started
Advertisements