Every day new cybersecurity threats emerge. Cybercriminals show no mercy or no sign of slowing down. They keep discovering new strategies for infiltrating IT systems & gaining access to sensitive data. A data breach or cyberattack on an enterprise or any organisation's digital system does not simply cause operational disturbances; it damages the brand's reputation.
That is where enterprises put dedicated Security Operations Centres (SOCs) with professionals and advanced tools to identify any threat & provide protection beforehand. This article will deliver a complete walkthrough of what SOC and SOCaaS are. Also, it will highlight what roles & responsibilities SOCaaS providers fulfil as part of their expert teams.
What is Security Operations Centre (SOC)?
Security Operations Centres (SOCs) are IT teams and security professionals that constantly monitor, analyse threats, and respond to incidents through their expertise and tools. A Security Operations Centre, popularly called the SOC, is a technological nerve centre or command post for the enterprise. They detect and shield from unwanted requests and cyber threats. They protect networks, employee computers, servers, IoT infrastructures, operating systems, endpoint devices, applications, and databases. They continuously inspect for signs of a cyber security incident. The SOC team establishes rules, identifies exceptions, enhances responses and keeps an eye out for new vulnerabilities.
What is SOCaaS?
Cloud computing has significantly revolutionised the way every digital service used to work. SOC tasks, when provided by a third-party cybersecurity team of experts, is called SOCaaS. It is a cybersecurity service model. The vendor renders cybersecurity services to analysis operations, monitoring, and security as a fully-managed SOC against a price. Rather than providing in-house SOC tasks, the entire SOC operation, analysis, threat detection, management, and forensics gets handed over to the vendor or service provider.
Roles and responsibilities of experts within SOCaaS
These roles and responsibilities may vary based on the SOCaaS vendor you opt for your business. As part of SOCaaS services, the team of experts fulfils the following roles & responsibilities:
- SOC Manager: Every SOCaaS service providers have SOC managers. They play a crucial role in the success of the team. SOC managers oversee all the operations of the SOC team. These managers ensure that the SOC functionalities are appropriately running. As SOC managers of the SOCaaS vendor firm, they also take care of the policies & procedures used in continuously monitoring & improving the clients' security posture.
- Security Analyst: Security analysts are experts who have the potential to predict and analyse cyber threats to clients. They use various tools and strategies to detect possible threats and security incidents. They are also responsible for monitoring and preventing attacks on data.
- Threat monitoring professionals: Threat monitoring professionals play a significant role in SOCaaS. They use tools and techniques to monitor networks and other client infrastructures for continuous security. Threat monitoring SOC professionals use tools like firewalls, anti-malware scanners, packet filtering tools, etc.
- Incident responders: They are expert SOC team members responsible for implementing incident response systems. They actively coordinate with other security professionals and SOC team members to remove the contamination or mitigate the security risk. They might also have to work with security tool developers to enhance the potential of threat detection. They are the first professionals who respond when a security breach or attack occurs on the client system.
- Forensics analysts: These are experts & security scientists. They work as part of the SOCaaS team. They uncover the mystery behind any incident. They examine the attack or data breach from various angles to identify the suspect or vulnerability that triggered the incident. They will closely investigate the incident and explore data to recognise patterns and trends so that such an attack never happens in the future.
- Customer Success Team: They are the communication backbone for the SOCaaS service. Since SOCaaS service providers deliver remote services to their clients, the customer success team ensures that customer stakeholders remain informed with all the updates about any security incidents. Also, they communicate with the client company to make them aware if there are internal threats or misconduct in set policies.
- Threat intelligence Analysts: They are expert security professionals who dissect a cyber threat, collect necessary details and broadcast threat intelligence details to the rest of the team. They work in collaboration with the entire SOC team to provide comprehensive security solutions. They ensure that all security aspects of a threat get sealed & the client is free from attack.
Conclusion –
SOCaaS monitoring services are an excellent option for businesses that don't want in-house security monitoring and incident response. If you plan to choose a SOCaaS, ensure they have some or all of these team players. These roles and responsibilities might vary slightly depending on the SOCaaS vendor service you have chosen for enterprise security.
