What Is the Role of Soc in Cyber Security - Protect Your Data
The managed SOC providers strength varies depending on the organization and industry’s size. Moreover, they generally share similar roles and responsibilities. Further, a SOC (Security Operation Center) is a major functional unit in an organization that employs people, processes, and technology. In this regard, it is useful to monitor and enhance an organization’s security posture while preventing, detecting, analyzing, and responding to cyber alerts.
What is the Role of SOC in Cyber Security?
Below are the roles and responsibilities of the security operation center:
Prevention and detection: In the field of cybersecurity, prevention is better than the reaction. Instead of responding to threats as they occur, a SOC continuously monitors the network to detect and prevent cyber activities. Further, when the SOC analyst identifies some suspicious instances, they gather information for deeper investigation.
Investigation: In this stage, the SOC professional examines the suspicious activity to determine the threat’s nature and its level of penetration in infrastructure. Besides this, they view the attack from the attacker's point of view, looking for indicators and vulnerabilities before exploitation. Also, the analyst performs a triage on several types of security incidents by comprehending the attack timing and process and how to quickly respond to the attack within the time limit. Furthermore, the SOC experts collect information about the organization’s network including specific attacker tools, strategies, and trends.
Response: After conducting the investigation, the SOC team responded to mitigate the issue. At the time when the incident is confirmed, the SOC acts as the first responder. Thereafter, they isolate endpoints, terminate harmful processes, and prevent systems from executing, deleting files, and many more. In addition, SOC works to retrieve the lost or compromised data. However, in case of ransomware attacks, they deploy viable backups to recover the misplaced information returning the network to its pre-incident state.
Interim SOC Challenges
SOC teams must stay ahead of attackers, which is increasingly challenging. After knowing the what is the role of a SOC in cyber security, let’s find out the eminent challenges. Here are the top three SOC challenges:
1. Cybersecurity skills shortage: Based on the survey conducted by Dimensional Research, 53% of SOCs face difficulty in hiring skilled personnel. For the same reason, understaffed teams lack the advanced skills to identify cyber threats in a timely and effective manner. The (ISC)² Workforce Study recommends a 145% workforce growth to bridge the skills gap to defend organizations worldwide.
2. Alert overload: As the organizations are growing, they add new tools for threat detection which leads to a constant influx of security alerts. As a result, the overwhelming number of threat alerts can cause alert fatigue. However, most of the alerts lack useful context, and intelligence, leading to false positives, draining time and resources, and majorly distracting teams from real incidents.
3. Operational complexity: Indeed, many worthy organizations use disconnected security tools. In the like manner, this forces the personnel to bridge security alerts and policies between environments. In fact, this creates costly, complex, and inefficient security operations.
Finishing line
After going through the write-up, you must have gotten the answer to the question “What is the role of SOC in Cyber Security” Plus, you also acquired the information regarding the importance of SOC. Adding to the same, the security operation center is a significant asset for safeguarding your data in the form of digital assets.