What is a SOC?
A Security Operations Center (SOC) is a centralized function that continuously monitors an organization's security posture. SOCs employ dedicated teams, standardized processes, and integrated technologies to prevent, detect, analyze, and respond to cybersecurity incidents in real-time.
Every SOC implementation is unique and constantly evolving; according to Gartner, nearly three-quarters (73%) of security leaders saw their operating model change within the last year alone. Organizations can build in-house SOCs, outsource to managed security service providers, or adopt hybrid models that combine both approaches.
SOCs have become critical for modern threat defense. The threat landscape continues to escalate—with over 290 million data breaches reported in 2023 alone. SOCs protect high-value assets including business secrets, customer PII, credentials, and intellectual property that attackers actively target.
The SOC market reflects this growing need. SOC-as-a-service is projected to reach $11.4 billion by 2028, driven by organizations seeking expert security capabilities without building internal teams.
Organizations have multiple SOC deployment options to choose from, but the core functions remain consistent: prevent, detect, analyze, and respond to security threats.
Key Goals of a Security Operations Center
A SOC's primary goal is protecting organizational assets while ensuring business continuity. This involves defending against threats, minimizing security incidents, and maintaining operational resilience.
Key SOC objectives include:
Threat prevention and detection: Proactively identify and mitigate risks before they become incidents
Rapid incident response: Reduce mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to response (MTTR)
Business continuity: Minimize downtime and financial losses from security events
Compliance management: Maintain adherence to industry regulations and security standards
Security optimization: Efficiently allocate resources and demonstrate security investment ROI
Cultural development: Build organization-wide security awareness and best practices
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Measuring SOC Goals
To effectively measure SOC performance, key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential. These metrics help quantify the SOC's success in achieving its goals.
Examples of KPIs:
Incident Response: Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), Mean Time to Respond (MTTR), Mean Time to Contain (MTTC), and incident resolution rate.
Threat Detection: False positive rate, true positive rate, and threat detection efficiency.
Security Posture: Vulnerability remediation rate, patch compliance, and system configuration compliance.
Cost Efficiency: Cost per incident, cost per protected asset, and return on security investment (ROSI).
Aligning SOC Goals with Business Objectives
A successful SOC should directly contribute to the overall business strategy. To achieve this alignment, the SOC must:
Understand business priorities: Identify critical assets, systems, and data that support core business functions.
Quantify security risks: Assess the potential impact of security incidents on business operations, revenue, and reputation.
Demonstrate business value: Show how the SOC's efforts contribute to revenue generation, cost reduction, or risk mitigation.
Communicate effectively: Clearly articulate the SOC's role in achieving business objectives to stakeholders.
How does a SOC function?
What are the main roles within a SOC team?
SOC teams are structured in tiers with specialized roles and responsibilities. Each role focuses on specific aspects of threat detection, analysis, and response to ensure comprehensive security coverage.
Core SOC roles include:
Chief Information Security Officer (CISO): Strategic security leadership and executive communication
SOC Manager: Operational oversight of teams, tools, workflows, and daily activities
Security Engineers: Design and maintain cybersecurity architecture and infrastructure
Threat Hunters: Proactively search for advanced threats and hidden adversaries
Security Analysts: Monitor environments, investigate alerts, and perform initial incident triage
Forensic Specialists: Analyze security incidents to determine root cause and prevent recurrence
What are the day-to-day processes in a SOC?
SOC operations follow a continuous cycle of monitoring, detection, analysis, and response. These processes run 24/7 to identify and neutralize threats before they cause business impact.
Daily SOC processes include:
Continuous monitoring: Real-time scanning of IT environments and assets for threat indicators
Alert triage: Prioritizing security alerts based on severity, business context, and potential impact
Threat investigation: Analyzing suspicious activities to validate legitimacy and assess risk level
Incident containment: Isolating threats to minimize blast radius and prevent lateral movement
System remediation: Recovering compromised assets, applying patches, and restoring normal operations
Forensic analysis: Examining incidents to understand attacker tactics and improve future defenses
What are the main technologies and tools used in a SOC?
A Security Operations Center relies on a layered set of technologies to collect data, detect threats, investigate incidents, and coordinate responses. While every SOC stack looks a little different, most include tools across these categories:
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM): The central nervous system of a SOC, aggregating logs and events from across the environment to enable real-time monitoring, correlation, and alerting.
Endpoint and Network Detection (EDR/XDR, IDS/IPS): Tools that monitor and analyze endpoint and network activity to uncover malware, intrusions, or lateral movement that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Cloud Detection and Response (CDR): Purpose-built for cloud environments, these platforms detect threats across cloud workloads, containers, and serverless applications by correlating cloud-native telemetry and identity activity.
Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs): Feeds and enrichment services that provide context on attacker tactics, indicators of compromise (IOCs), and emerging vulnerabilities.
Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR): Platforms that help analysts work more efficiently by automating repetitive triage tasks and standardizing incident response playbooks.
Vulnerability and Exposure Management: Scanners and platforms that continuously assess systems, applications, and configurations for weaknesses an attacker could exploit.
Identity and Access Security: IAM, PAM, and CIEM solutions that give visibility into user privileges, help enforce least privilege, and detect risky or excessive entitlements.
Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs): Unified platforms that consolidate capabilities like CSPM, DSPM, and CIEM to give SOC teams full visibility into cloud configurations, identities, and data — eliminating blind spots left by traditional, siloed tools.
Forensics and Investigation: Sandboxes, log analysis platforms, and digital forensics tools that allow deeper investigation after an incident.
Collaboration and Reporting: Case management systems, dashboards, and integrations with communication platforms that support effective workflows and executive reporting.
Together, these technologies give SOC teams the visibility, context, and automation they need to detect and respond to threats at scale. In modern environments, the emphasis is increasingly on cloud-native detection and response and CNAPPs that unify context across code, identities, workloads, and data – ensuring security teams can focus on the risks that matter most.
What are the different types of SOC models?
Organizations can deploy SOCs using three primary models, each with distinct advantages and use cases.
SOC deployment models:
In-house SOC: Complete internal ownership of people, processes, and technology
Best for: Large enterprises with significant security budgets and internal expertise
Key benefit: Full control over security operations and sensitive data
Outsourced SOC: Third-party managed security service provider handles all SOC operations
Best for: Organizations lacking internal security expertise or 24/7 staffing capabilities
Key benefit: Access to specialized expertise and round-the-clock monitoring
Hybrid SOC: Combination of internal teams and external managed services
Best for: Most organizations seeking balanced cost, control, and expertise
Key benefit: Flexibility to keep critical functions internal while outsourcing specialized tasks
According to Gartner, 63% of surveyed enterprises prefer a hybrid SOC model that leverages both in-house and outsourced security resources. Thirty-four percent feature an in-house SOC model that doesn’t include any external service providers.
Choosing a SOC model
How does a business know which SOC model it should choose? The following are five key considerations for building or choosing in-house and outsourced SOC models:
| Considerations | In-House SOC | Outsourced SOC |
|---|---|---|
| Customization and cost | An in-house SOC gives organizations a higher degree of control. However, in-house models are more expensive. | Businesses may not always be able to intricately tailor off-the-shelf SOC solutions, but they are considerably cheaper. |
| Scalability | In-house SOCs are not easy or affordable to scale. | Outsourced SOCs feature higher degrees of scalability, which can help accommodate future variables. |
| Required expertise | In-house SOC teams have in-depth knowledge of enterprise IT assets and resources. That said, they may lack other critical cybersecurity knowledge or expertise. | Third-party providers may not understand an enterprise’s IT environments as well as in-house security operations teams. On the other hand, third-party teams may have more expertise and skill sets related to the latest cybersecurity threats and trends. |
| Risk of coverage gaps | Because of the close proximity to their own environments, in-house SOC teams may have a biased or limited perspective. | Outsourced SOCs will likely have a more objective and panoramic view of an enterprise’s IT environments and adversaries. |
| Ease of updates | It’s often expensive for in-house SOCs to commission and include new tools and technologies. | Third-party providers constantly update and optimize their backend infrastructure and tools to serve their customers with cutting-edge capabilities. |
As we can see from the above table, both in-house and outsourced SOC models have myriad advantages and disadvantages. That’s perhaps why the majority of enterprises often choose the best of both worlds. In some cases, though, businesses may have a valid reason to choose one over the other. There’s no clear right or wrong answer when it comes to choosing a SOC model. Instead, it’s about understanding your unique IT and cybersecurity requirements and identifying a model that addresses them.
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How Wiz can support SOC teams
Wiz is built to empower Security Operations Center teams – helping them detect, investigate, contain, and recover from cloud threats faster and more effectively. Below are the main ways Wiz adds value, including its new Incident Response Services.
Key Capabilities SOCs Get from Wiz
Unified Cloud Security Platform (CNAPP) with Deep Visibility
Wiz provides agent-less & agent-based visibility across cloud infrastructure, workloads, identities, configuration, secrets, and data.
Wiz's Security Graph correlates cloud context (configuration, identity, runtime) with threat signals, making it easier to understand attack paths, root cause, and potential blast radius (i.e., how far damage can spread).
Cloud Detection & Response (CDR)
Wiz monitors runtime behavior, detects anomalous/cloud-native threats, and provides investigation tools tuned for cloud environments. This includes forensics, runtime telemetry, container activity, etc.
Pre-built / customizable cloud-native playbooks allow SOCs to respond using actions that make sense in cloud architectures (e.g. isolate a compromised workload) rather than generic actions meant for traditional on-prem settings.
Prioritization and Context for Faster Response
Wiz doesn’t just surface vulnerabilities or misconfigurations; it helps prioritize what really matters (e.g. exposure to internet, active threat, exploitable vulnerabilities) to direct SOC resources more efficiently.
Tools to quickly assess damage are built in – identifying the blast radius, root causes, affected assets. These help shrink investigation time and limit impact.
Cloud-Native Incident Response Expertise (New IR Services Offering)
Wiz Incident Response Services is a relatively new offering that extends Wiz beyond just tooling: it provides expert help when a cloud incident strikes. Wiz combines its technology (especially Wiz Defend + the Security Graph) with a team of cloud-native IR experts who can assist from first alert through recovery.
With this service, SOC teams can get help with:
Forensics & threat hunting in cloud environments
Root cause and attack path analysis
Containment & remediation guidance (limiting attack spread)
Expert support to rebuild securely & reduce risk of recurrence
Essentially, Wiz acts as an extension of your SOC team – helping reduce the time to response and recovery, especially when internal capacity or experience in cloud incidents is limited.
Want to learn more? Get a demo now and see how your SOC teams can benefit from Wiz’s industry-leading cloud security platform.
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