What Does a Good SOC Team Do?

Organizations of all kinds are worried about protecting themselves from cyberattacks. As with most things, the best options will pay for themselves in the long run. This is why it’s wise to opt for high-quality tools and employees when meeting security needs. Having a good SOC team is an essential part of this. But what does a good SOC team do?

What Is a SOC?

A security operations center (SOC) is something that needs to be a part of every organization’s network security budget. With a SOC, enterprises dedicate resources to having a dedicated team of security experts monitoring their networks, along with advanced tools to identify potential threats.

While some enterprises with enough capital will choose to have their SOC on-premises, most, both for reasons of scale and overall cost savings, will elect for SOC services.

What Is SOC-As-a-Service?

There are a few things that differentiate SOC-as-a-Service. Because it’s a service-based option, the infrastructure and workers in the SOC aren’t at the organization’s own office facilities. Instead, they operate from a third-party platform, which comes with a few distinct advantages.

For starters, scaling SOC services up and down based on need is much faster and easier than when done on-premises, which requires a hefty initial investment for what might not be nearly as effective. Being natively cloud-based is a further advantage to SOC services versus their counterparts. This leads to more responsive and seamless ingestion into a virtual network such as SD-WAN.

What Does a Good SOC Team Do?

Regardless of whether an enterprise chooses an on-premises or service-based SOC, it’s important to know what to expect from a good SOC team. Here are a few of the top considerations:

Experts on all the time – There’s no such thing as a holiday when it comes to protecting enterprise networks. The entire concept of a data breach is about taking advantage of a vulnerability. A good SOC team will have your back all the time, 24 hours per day, seven days per week, all year long. You never know when threats might arise. Since time is such a critical element to identifying and containing breaches, it’s necessary to have a dedicated SOC team watching your networks for abnormalities all the time. A malicious actor can access credentials in only a few hours, then lurk for months while laterally jumping closer to its target. It can take months for enterprises to detect and respond to these threats—hopefully before it’s too late. A service-based SOC is particularly good for this, as they will have access to the top industry experts.

Cutting-edge tools – Even the best cybersecurity experts need the right tools to stay ahead of ever-evolving threats. A good SOC team will have technologies powered by AI and machine learning, which can realize specific network behaviors, and immediately know when something is off. It’s also important for a good SOC team to have endpoint security tools, such as EDR. These specifically target endpoints, which are a growing security concern for organizations today. The massive influx in non-IT-approved devices connecting to enterprise networks due to remote work, bring-your-own-device policies, and Internet-of-Things devices, is creating huge vulnerabilities in endpoints. Dedicated tools are necessary for ensuring security and compliance.

Excellent customer experience – When working with a service-based SOC—or being a stakeholder with an on-premises SOC—visibility and communication are major issues. A good SOC will give total visibility into macro and micro details of enterprise network security, as well as plans for future-proofing operations.

Integrates with your virtual network – Many enterprises today are using technology like SD-WAN for their networking needs. A good SOC will be able to integrate their tools and monitoring activities directly into your virtual network. Another advantage of a SOC-as-a-Service is that the provided will have an offering that combines these, such as SASE. Investigating these options can be a prudent move for organizations looking to consolidate for both financial and security reasons.

A good SOC team is priceless for an enterprise. Knowing what this looks like will allow stakeholders and managers to confidently seek out the required resources.