Importance of a Security Operations Center

Almost every day, we hear or read about a cyber-attack or breach in an organization’s security that causes a huge loss of data and money. Business owners are getting smarter, and they are starting to take strict actions towards cyber attackers. It is essential for any admin to keep their online assets and infrastructure safe because they can be a target for a cyber-attacker in case they find any irregularities in the system. Today, organizations are starting to expand their vulnerability detection capabilities by investing in a Security Operations Center (SOC) that detects flaws in their IT infrastructure, which may lead to cyber attacks. Improving the organization’s IT security posture should be an owner’s main concern.

What Is a Security Operations Center (SOC)?

A Security Operations Center (SOC) is a facility that has an in-house IT security team whose main job is to monitor and constantly analyze organizations' security posture on a daily basis. The security team analyzes the IT systems and detects flaws or threats through a strong set of processes and technology solutions. They are also responsible for identifying and resolving threats of an organization’s information assets. The SOC team works closely with incident response teams in an organization to quickly take actions upon discovery. The SOC team also consists of security analysts and experts who oversee security operations.

A Security Operations Center is able to identify a potential attack by learning the mechanisms of the attack and what part of the IT system it will compromise. Organizations that have a SOC are able to detect flaws in their IT systems and can thus avoid an unfortunate incident.

How Does a Security Operations Center (SOC) Work and Why Is it Important

IT leaders are starting to make important decisions on securing their IT systems and are now focusing on human impact rather than technology impact to examine and lower threats. Members of the team continuously monitor and analyze known and existing threats to study emerging risks. Technology systems, such as firewalls, can prevent basic attacks but the human analysis can put major incidents to bed. The SOC needs to be updated with the latest technology, like threat intelligent systems, which can be helpful in improving decisions and defense mechanisms. The SOC collects all the data from within the organization and correlates with information from external sources, like news feeds, incident reports, threat briefs, and vulnerabilities alerts, which provide insights into vulnerabilities and helps in staying on top of evolving cyber threats. Your SOC team should be ahead of incidents by feeding threat intelligence data into tools to keep updated processes to discriminate between real threats and non-threats. High-end SOCs make use of security automation to become more effective and efficient. Through highly-skilled security experts with security automation, organizations are able to enhance their analytical power to increase security measures and defend security breaches and cyber-attacks. Most of the time, organizations who don’t have in-house resources or capabilities outsource the SOC services.

Benefits of Having a Security Operations Center (SOC)

One of the main benefits of having a Security Operations Center is that it improves security incident detection through constant monitoring and analysis. Through this activity, the SOC team can analyze networks, servers, and database, which ensures timely detection of security incidents. Monitoring 24/7, a SOC is able to provide organizations with an advantage to defend against intrusions regardless of the type of attack at any time.

Conclusion

Today, it is important for organizations to ensure that their IT infrastructure is well protected because it holds very valuable information and is an integral part of the company. SOC services provide deep insights into an organizations security posture and recommend the fixes and changes to ensure healthy IT infrastructure. It can be a very expensive affair to lose your data in case of a cyber-attack, but if you have SOC services in place, then it proactively detects incidents and ensures optimum safety.