Understanding the SOC mission
A security operations center (SOC) is an organization’s cybersecurity command and control center and is tasked with protecting digital infrastructure, detecting cyber threats, and responding to incidents in real time. Basically, it's like a CCTV monitoring system, a threat detection engine, and a search and rescue team rolled into one.
Without this combination of tools and people—the SOC—organizations can’t get ahead of threats to sensitive data, intellectual property, and cloud infrastructure. Simply put, without an effective SOC, cyberattackers can strike without warning, detection and containment will be slower, downtime will be unpreventable, and your business reputation may be on the line.
Top SOC best practices
What SOC best practices should organizations adopt to outpace threats? Let’s unpack them below.
1. Align strategy with business goals
Get your SOC ball rolling by defining specific security goals and syncing them with overall business objectives. After all, it’s difficult enough ensuring business and IT units work with security in mind, but getting C-suite execs to sign off on security spendings? That’s a tall order. With SOC strategy tied to business goals, it’s easier to get all hands on deck.
First, SOC teams must understand their enterprises’ unique business goals: Is it maximizing user satisfaction, keeping customer trust, or protecting intellectual property? Or is it accelerating business growth by minimizing unnecessary expenditures like fines and lawsuits?
SOC teams must also identify their most vulnerable assets and discover the most likely threats to their organization based on their unique industry and technology stack—e.g., financial institutions are vulnerable to fraud and data theft, and Kubernetes is vulnerable to IAM misconfigurations. SOC teams should then plan detection and response investments to match their particular threat models, focusing more effort on areas that are more important for their organization.
With goals, vulnerabilities, and potential threats in mind, SOC teams can set measurable outcomes geared towards minimizing downtime or preventing data breaches. Other measurable goals could be improving mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to remediate (MTTR), or staying compliant to avoid regulatory fines.
2. Adopt the people, process, and technology (PPT) model
In the PPT model, the people bring the skill, the process helps you stay on track, and the technologies deliver the results:
The people are the SOC leaders, security engineers, and incident responders who make the SOC work. They configure the tools, interpret contextualized insights, deploy a combination of hunch and expertise to halt threats, and offer tried-and-tested remediation measures.
Well-defined SOC processes bring consistency, clarity, and efficiency to the table, facilitating repetitive tasks, injecting precision into threat detection, and fast-tracking incident response.
As for the technologies, they are the various tools used to monitor your stack and provide insights into potential threats. Notable cloud-native SOC tools include cloud detection and response (CDR); security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR); security information and event management (SIEM); and cloud-focused threat intelligence platforms.
While each of these components (the people, processes, and technology) is critical, the real impact comes when you combine all three forces.
3. Build a proactive threat detection strategy
A proactive threat detection strategy is the backbone of a successful SOC. So what makes a proactive threat detection strategy work? Key components are continuous monitoring, user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), contextual data correlation, threat intelligence gathering, and penetration testing. Let's take a closer look at each of these in the table below.
| Strategy | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Continuous monitoring | Ingest and analyze telemetry from across your environment, including both audit logs from cloud service providers (like AWS CloudTrail or VPC Flow Logs) and workload data from runtime sensors. Without continuous monitoring of real-time telemetry, you can’t detect and stop threats when they occur. |
| UEBA | User and entity behavior analytics helps understand the baselines for user activity around sensitive assets and identify anomalies like unusual login attempts and suspicious configuration changes; the goal is stopping attackers in their tracks before they do damage |
| Contextual data correlation | Gives the full picture of threats in the environment, for example, showing how an access key publicly exposed in a storage bucket in one place and unusual activity associated with that access key somewhere else can—together—tell the full story of an attack |
| Threat intelligence gathering | Threat intelligence enriches detection capabilities and tells SOCs about the latest attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) so that they can be eliminated |
| Penetration testing | Simulates attacks to uncover vulnerabilities |
4. Roll out incident response (IR) plans and playbooks for a range of scenarios
An incident response plan spells out clearly defined guidelines an IR team must follow to detect, contain, eliminate, and recover from a security incident while limiting the potential damage.
An IR playbook expands on that incident response plan, providing highly detailed instructions to handle specific scenarios (for example, a ransomware attack or an insider threat). An IR template can help here so you don’t have to start from scratch, and a good example of a scenario-specific IR playbook template is the Wiz IR playbook template for AWS ransomware attacks.
Keep in mind that an IR playbook can also be role-specific. For example, you can outline a playbook covering messaging your PR team must adopt in case of an insider attack, another for a supply chain attack, and so on.
Rock-solid IR plans and playbooks can tip the scales when a breach occurs. When tensions are high, you don’t need various departments squabbling over who should do what. You need prespecified, rinse-and-repeat guidelines that every stakeholder simply adopts. And this is what IR plans and playbooks bring.
That said, it’s still important to properly test IR plans and playbooks and regularly update them. You can't afford to take the wrong step or use an out-of-date incident response plan at a critical time.
5. Opt for a risk-based approach
A risk-based approach to SOC and incident response prioritizes threats based on their exploitability and potential risk to the organization. Imagine your SOC simultaneously discovers two instances of the exact same indicator of compromise: suspicious access patterns on an S3 bucket. However, one bucket contains sensitive personally identifiable information (PII), whereas the second bucket contains only non-sensitive artifacts from a developer test environment. Which do you prioritize? Obviously, it has to be the former.
But there are instances where the risk level isn't that obvious. In these cases, frameworks that support risk-based decision-making, like FAIR or MITRE ATT&CK, will come in handy. In addition to these frameworks, modern context-aware tools offer risk-based prioritization out of the box and clear alerts of unnecessary noise so that teams can handle high-criticality risks faster.
6. Automation and orchestration
Automation and orchestration are the superpowers of every effective SOC. But what do you automate and orchestrate? A good place to apply automation is when triggering IR workflows (think isolating infected workloads, blocking suspicious IPs, and containing threats in real time).
With orchestration, you can synchronize various security tools like SIEM, CDR, and web application firewalls (WAFs), allowing them to work together to improve your overall security posture.
Automation and orchestration offer other benefits too: They can also be used to handle repetitive SOC tasks, initiate compliance checks at prespecified periods, and accelerate big data analytics for swift threat detection.
IR Playbook Template: AWS Ransomware Attacks
The AWS Ransomware Incident Response Playbook Template from Wiz is designed to give incident responders a practical, step-by-step guide tailored specifically for AWS environments.
Download template
Wiz Defend: Your ultimate SOC solution
Because it’s tasked with anticipating and responding to threats before they hit, your SOC needs best-in-class tools to deliver. Enter Wiz Defend.
Wiz Defend enables SecOps teams to take on cloud threats through:
Incident readiness: Wiz Defend continuously closes visibility gaps, both identifying missing telemetry and incomplete runtime coverage and providing actionable recommendations for improvement based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
Threat detection: Cross-layer threat detections leverage the cloud control plane, data, network, identity, infrastructure SaaS, and workload runtime (via eBPF) for comprehensive coverage.
Investigation and triage: A unified, visual storyline and AskAI copilot accelerate root cause analysis and reduce MTTR by automating data gathering and correlation.
Response and forensics: Runtime threat blocking, one-click containment playbooks, and AI-generated remediation steps streamline incident response workflows.
Wiz threat intelligence feed: The Wiz Cloud Threat Landscape keeps you informed about the latest attacker TTPs and specific defenses you can put in place to combat them. It’s cloud-focused and noise-free—meaning you get only the most important, already contextualized threat data.
Looking to experience a seamless SOC journey, fast-track threat detection, and enjoy one-click remediation? Request a demo today, and see how Wiz can protect everything you build and run in the cloud.
Cloud-Native Incident Response
Learn why security operations team rely on Wiz to help them proactively detect and respond to unfolding cloud threats.
