Gone are the days when firewalls and antiviruses used to provide adequate network and cloud security. It appears that malicious actors have gotten smart by each passing day and have started to bypass these defenses. Thanks to development in the field of Cyber Security we know that setting up a Security Operations Centre (SOC) can provide regular monitoring, however, it is rendered to be very expensive, time consuming, and difficult to staff. SOC-as-a-Service comes in as a savior and an effective way to throw off threat actors in order to increase security.
A Security Operations Centre (SOC) has always been an efficient cybersecurity strategy. With the use of both technology and humans, SOC introduces the ability to identify, inquire, and eliminate specific cyber dangers.
A modern SOC is more important than ever because of the growing attack surface, alert fatigue, lack of cyber-skilled workers, and compliance being a top concern for CISOs.
You can either build your own Security Operations Centre (SOC) or hire a managed group of services if you don’t already have one. These two distinct routes can be pursued by organizations depending on their hiring expenses and expertise.
Now, the SOC-as-a-service (SOCaaS) industry has matured to the point where the term is falling into disfavour as managed services vendors have become more integral to the practice. As cloud-based security tools have gotten better, data centres and applications have migrated there as well. Some of the services discussed here call themselves SOCaaS, while others use managed service designations.
Another acronym that serves as additional proof of this growth is secure access service edge (SASE). As hybrid cloud environments have gained popularity, this phrase is typically used to describe unified security tools. Let’s avoid getting lost in the tool variety. The secret is being able to use all of these tools as an integrated whole, without being lost or slowed down by all warnings. With a SOCaaS, you can give a comprehensive view of your security ecosystem and fill in the gaps between the tools.
These are the features you need in place to have an effective SOC
All the advantages of a dedicated 24/7 SOC are provided by SOC-as-a-Service (SOCaaS), but without the high costs, complexity, and hassles associated with setting it up, staffing it, and monitoring it. Organizations can use a managed SOC service to outsource the personnel, operational procedures, and technological requirements for a SOC, which is run and managed remotely and provided as a cloud-based service.
An external SOC will perform crucial security tasks as an extension of your staff. Be careful to research the level of technology, experience supplied, and understand what you’re paying for before selecting a SOC-as-a-Service provider. Compliance is a crucial factor to take into account. The completion of SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 accreditation by third-party vendors of SOC-as-a-Service or other relevant security services is crucial. You can ensure that the vendor has safeguards in place to protect your data and that they are being used, which will provide you and your clients peace of mind.
Organizations are searching for more comprehensive managed security than what a standard managed security service provider (MSSP) can offer, because a SOC is so important for today’s enterprises. For instance, a legacy MSSP frequently offers simpler functions, like:
SOCaaS, increases defensive capabilities such as,
A SOC-as-a-Service provider should gather information from as many pertinent sources as they can, including logs, data, and other telemetry. With more data, the system’s (data science/automated detection engine’s) ability to identify genuinely suspicious or malicious behaviour for further investigation will be strengthened.
Specifically, each of the following log sources and data types should be leveraged by the platform:
The top SOC-as-a-Service vendors can use cutting-edge data science techniques to automate and enhance the detection process after data has been collected in order to make significant correlations, lower the number of false positives, and increase confidence in the detections that need to be investigated.
To effectively accomplish this, it must combine supervised and unsupervised machine learning, rule-based, signature-based criteria, and behaviour pattern-match detection techniques. It should smoothly use thorough and up-to-date threat intelligence to spot malicious activity and gradually improve protection.
An effective SOC-as-a-Service provider must go beyond the basic capabilities of a traditional Security Information and Event Management system (SIEM). Instead, it needs to combine a broad range of essential functions in a single, cloud-native technology platform. The platform must accelerate and improve the effectiveness of threat detection, hunting, investigation, triaging, case management, and remediation.
The platform should also be able to search efficiently against massive amounts of data captured from a variety of sources to quickly identify the data most pertinent to forensic investigation.
