What is a SOC?
A Security Operations Center (SOC) is a centralized function within an organization that employs people, processes, and technology to continuously monitor and improve an organization's security posture while preventing, detecting, analyzing, and responding to cybersecurity incidents.
Every SOC is unique. Made up of teams and processes as well as various tools and technologies, businesses can either outsource their SOC or build and maintain it in-house. Regardless of its implementation, the central objective of a SOC is to constantly optimize an organization's security posture and prevent cyberattacks.
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These days, SOCs are increasingly important: After all, the threat landscape is more damaging than ever before. According to The Independent, threat actors caused more than 290 million data leaks in 2023. Without a powerful SOC, it’s almost impossible to prevent leaks and compromises; a SOC guards enterprise data, particularly high-value crown jewels such as business secrets, customers’ personally identifiable information (PII), credentials, and intellectual property.
The booming SOC-as-a-service market, which will reach $11.4 billion by 2028, underlines the importance of SOCs. As we’ll see, businesses have many SOC models to choose from and numerous factors to consider before making that decision. However, whichever model a company chooses, the fundamental functions and objectives of a SOC are the same. Let’s take a closer look.
Key Goals of a Security Operations Center
A security operations center's primary goal is to protect organizational assets and ensure business continuity. To achieve this, the SOC aims to:
Minimize downtime and financial loss due to security incidents.
Enhance the organization's security posture by proactively identifying and mitigating risks.
Improve incident response time and reduce the impact of cyberattacks.
Maintain compliance with industry regulations and standards.
Build and maintain a strong security culture within the organization.
Optimize security investments through efficient resource allocation.
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?
Chief information security officers (CISOs), who are at the top of the cybersecurity hierarchy, act as the bridge between the SOC and the CEO.
SOC managers oversee all the teams, tools, workflows, and activities of the SOC.
Security engineers build and maintain the enterprise’s cybersecurity architecture.
Threat hunters proactively search for new and hidden threats within the enterprise’s IT estate.
Security analysts monitor IT environments, red-flag anomalous behaviors, and triage alerts.
Forensic experts anatomize cyber incidents to unveil the root cause, which can help enterprises prevent similar exploits in the future.
What are the day-to-day processes in a SOC?
Threat monitoring: Scanning IT environments and assets to uncover threats
Alert triage: Prioritizing alerts and threats based on business and workload contexts
Threat analysis: Investigating threats to validate their legitimacy and potency
Threat isolation: Reducing the potential blast radius and attack path of each existing threat
Remediation: Recovering compromised systems, patching vulnerabilities, and undoing the damage caused by cyber incidents
Forensic investigation: Conducting thorough studies of threats, cyberattacks, and cloud events to understand adversary tools, tactics, and procedures (TTPs)
What are the main technologies and tools in a SOC?
An optimal SOC should be holistic and include a spectrum of capabilities. For example, a SOC should provide:
The means to identify and inventory all IT assets across physical and virtual infrastructures.
Intrusion detection mechanisms to identify signs of unauthorized access.
Proactive scanning of virtual machines, containers, container registries, serverless functions, virtual appliances, and managed compute resources (along with prioritization of any uncovered vulnerabilities).
Behavioral analytics tools to analyze anomalous patterns within IT environments.
Security information and event management (SIEM) tools to collect, manage, and analyze cybersecurity information from various branches of an organization.
EDR (endpoint detection and response) to monitor and protect enterprise endpoints.
Threat intelligence platforms to study an array of threat data from public, private, internal, and external sources.
Cloud Detection and Response to montor and protect an enterprise’s cloud environments
What are the different types of SOC models?
There are 3 types of SOC models:
In-house SOCs: Businesses manage and operate their SOC using only in-house resources.
Outsourced SOCs: Enterprises hire a third-party SOC-as-a-service provider to manage their SOC.
Hybrid SOCs: Businesses use a combination of in-house resources and outsourced services to manage their SOC.
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.
Empowering SecOps in the cloud: enhancing threat detection with Wiz and Google Security Operations
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How Wiz can support SOC teams
Wiz supports SOC teams through a variety of features and integrations designed to enhance security monitoring, threat detection, and incident response.
Key support mechanisms include:
Threat detection: Wiz provides dashboards and tools for real-time threat detection, allowing SOC teams to monitor and respond to security incidents promptly.
Security Graph: The Wiz Security Graph feature contextualizes security data, making it easier to identify and understand potential threats.
Cloud events: SOC teams can explore cloud events filtered by specific timeframes to pinpoint and investigate suspicious activities.
Policies and controls: Wiz enforces numerous security policies and controls, ensuring that your infrastructure remains secure and compliant with industry standards.
Integrations: Through seamless integration with various third-party tools for ticketing, SIEM, SOAR, and more, Wiz facilitates streamlined workflows and efficient incident management.
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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