The Indispensable Benefits of a Security Operations Center

What is a Security Operations Center?

A security operations center (SOC) is the facility out of which an information technology (IT) security team works. Within the standard Security Operations Center, personnel are primarily tasked with monitoring and analyzing the security posture of their organization—as well as their partners—and protecting sensitive data from threat actors. They do this by constantly reviewing the activity occurring on the organizational network including its endpoints, servers, databases, apps, and websites.

When monitoring and analyzing the movement of network devices, SOC team members aim to detect threats, anomalies, or hostile incidents against the network. Once an irregular activity is detected, the typical SOC transitions into remediation with the goal of isolating or stopping the incident before a full-blown attack commences. Many SOCs staff security analysts and an incident response (IR) team who work in coordination, allowing for an immediate response to unusual activity. With the aid of technology solutions and systematized processes, a functional SOC can prevent active threats from devastating an organization.

 How a Security Operations Center Works

The Security Operations Center team handles ongoing, operational components of enterprises’ information security instead of focusing on developing security strategies, designing security architecture, or implementing protective measures. The SOC’s staff consists primarily of security analysts working together to detect, analyze, respond to, report on, and prevent cybersecurity incidents. Additional SOC capabilities include advanced forensic analysis, cryptanalysis, and malware reverse engineering to analyze incidents.

Establishing a Security Operations Center involves incorporating business-specific goals from various departments and receiving input and support from executives. A SOC’s infrastructure consists of firewalls, breach detection solutions, and a security information and event management (SIEM) system. Technology should be implemented to collect data through data flows, telemetry, packet capture, syslog, and other methods so the SOC staff can correlate and analyze the data activities. Additionally, SOC analysts monitor endpoints and networks for vulnerabilities to protect valuable data and comply with company or government regulations.

Security Operations Staff and Their Responsibilities

Security Operations Center (SOC) Managers

A SOC that operates 24/7 has several managers who are responsible for supervising and executing everyday operations and the SOC’s cybersecurity team. Additionally, the SOC managers communicate updates with the company’s executive staff to ensure the operational mission is executed and there is continuity of services among the various teams.

Incident Responders

A cohesive team of incident responders remediate cyberattacks or breaches in real-time and implement the necessary practices to reduce and remove the threat. The IR team at SpearTip has the ability to respond quickly, reclaim your network before adversaries gain a foothold, and restore operations so that your business can run as it should.

Forensic Investigators

Forensic investigators are primarily responsible for identifying the root cause of all attacks, locating their source, and collecting and preserving any available supporting evidence. Forensic investigators look into business email compromise and a host of software or hardware issues by reviewing certain digital information like metadata logs, which can attribute actions to an individual person or account. This process is vitally important for legal proceedings and internal investigations.

Compliance Auditors

The compliance auditors ensure that all SOC processes and employee actions meet compliance requirements as detailed by industry standards or legal mandates.

SOC Security Analysts

A team of SOC security analysts reviews and organizes security alerts based on urgency and severity and runs regular vulnerability assessments. This team often works in tandem with detection and response software, like ShadowSpear, to maximize efficiency and minimize false positives. Knowledge of programming languages, system administrator capabilities, and security best practices are among the skills SOC security analysts maintain.

Threat Hunters

Cyber threat hunters are primarily tasked with identifying hard-to-detect threats by reviewing the data collected by the Security Operations Center. Additionally, the threat hunters’ routine schedule could include resilience and penetration testing. ShadowSpear cyber threat hunting continuously assesses networks for potentially unknown malicious threats and uncovers zero-day vulnerabilities, providing steps to resolve them.

Security Engineers

Security engineers work cooperatively to develop and design tools or systems to carry out effective intrusion detection and vulnerability management capabilities. The toolsets and platforms created by a SOC’s security engineers are often the same tools used by security analysts, threat hunters, and other SOC staff to identify, neutralize, and counter threats detected in the course of standard operations.

The SpearTip® Benefit

Building, staffing, and managing a security operations center is a very expensive process requiring state-of-the-art software and hardware in addition to a knowledgeable and experienced team. Most organizations do not have the ability to operate a mature SOC. SpearTip gives these establishments the opportunity to protect themselves and their valuable data with our SOC-as-a-service (SOCaaS) model. Utilizing our SOCaaS, our partners receive all the benefits of an in-house SOC at a greatly reduced cost, in addition to our comprehensive rapid response services: data breach investigation, IT remediation, decryption services, data mining, and digital forensics.

As part of our rapid response services, SpearTip’s partners gain constant threat monitoring of all network endpoints from our global network of SOCs, including multiple US locations. Our SOCs earn a SOC2 Type 2 certification annually, which brings our partners confidence in our practice, performance, and consistency. The mission of our SOCs is to assist businesses in resolving all threats, strengthening their security posture, and returning to normal operations with an immediate and efficient response to network anomalies in real time.

Many organizations with an in-house IT security team miss true positive threats against their environment due to a constant influx of alert messages. What sets our SOCs apart is their employment of our ShadowSpear Platform, an unparalleled toolset that allows our certified engineers to identify, neutralize, and counter malicious threats before they gain a foothold in your environment. The ShadowSpear Platform reduces noise by correlating alert logs, meaning that actual threats never go undetected by our industry-leading technology supported by experienced and capable experts.

On top of these enumerated benefits, SpearTip’s Security Operations Center offer a continuous investigative cycle and 24/7/365 support. Threat actors never stop trying to exploit your networks and steal your valuable data, which is why our SOCs work to always stay several steps ahead. Within the constantly evolving threat landscape, one thing remains constant: SpearTip defends you.

If your company is experiencing a breach, call our Security Operations Centers at 833.997.7327 to speak directly with an engineer.