More than 4 billion records were exposed to theft as cyber attackers hit organizations ranging from small firms to the international banking system. In today’s age of sophisticated digital hackers, your concern shouldn’t be if you’re going to get hacked, but what you’re going to do when it happens.

Security professionals say, to survive cyberattacks the most effective way to coordinate your defenses, is with a Security Operations Center (SOC). Investing in a Security Operations Center (SOC) can be your saving grace during an attempted cybersecurity attack.

A SOC is a cyber clearinghouse run by security professionals who leverage technology to monitor an organization’s entire information domain to help prevent, detect and respond to attacks. First and foremost, a SOC requires highly skilled security professionals to investigate security incidents, perform incident response and forensics, and help keep an organization afloat amid a data breach.

The modern SECURITY OPERATION CENTER is now facing up to the fact and preparing for a “when it will happen” as oppose to “if it will happen”, as cyber incidents become more inevitable.

Why is Security Operation Center is Important?

The main purpose of establishing a security operation center is to maintain centralized safety rules for a business. SOC’s main task is responsible for reporting every threat and handle indications that something is wrong in the network or system and stop them quickly. SOC can be simply defined as a centralized unit that deals with security on an organizational level. It involves authorizing an individual to provide regular prevention and defense against major attacks while noticing and justifying major threats to a business. Ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of a modern information technology, security analysts organized to detect, analyze, respond to, report on, and prevent cyber security incidents.

With security operation center (SOC), the organization gets an opportunity to uncover all of the major network susceptibilities and weaknesses. A well-functioning Security Operations Center (SOC) can form the heart of effective detection. It can enable information security functions to respond faster, work more collaboratively and share knowledge more effectively.

Some of the major benefits that organization will get from an effective SOC are:

Response

The SOC creates processes with enough breadth and depth to sufficiently address all possible incident scenarios and provide detailed guidance for response. The SOC requires talented resources who possess deep technical knowledge and expert analysts who are the core requirements for an effective SOC. Expert team of analysts to properly analyze problems and respond immediately to prevent any destruction. Without proper skilled personnel, any number of processor or technologies won’t help in building a proper structure.

Recovery

It’s important to have a disaster recovery plan in place. Once the detected breach has been fully scoped and the infected files have been contained, there needs to be a plan in place to restore normal business operating processes.
On-time recovery of services from attacks such as distributed denial of services (DDoS) is a core requirement for every business. You can prevent every type of unauthorized activity if they are for the purpose of directing a huge amount of users towards your site in order to make it down. The SOC is in a constant arms race to maintain parity with the changing environment and threat landscape.

Regular Analysis

By using advanced techniques, the SOC can analyze data across various systems and devices, providing visibility into unique trends and patterns that may have been obscured otherwise. Today’s SOCs have the arduous task of monitoring enormous volumes of data by using advanced techniques and have the ability to shield information from upcoming attacks once they will analyze the existing incidents if they occur recently.

Real-time Monitoring

The SOC aims to detect and contain attacks and intrusions in the shortest possible timeframe, providing real-time monitoring and analysis of suspicious events and limiting the potential impact and/or damage that an incident may have. With an active operation center, all of the logs and other system’s data are efficiently monitored on real-time basis for instant response formulation in order to prevent security attacks.

Reporting

The SOC also uses analytics to create insightful metrics and performance measures. Thus, a thoughtful metrics and reporting framework can add value beyond security matters by also serving as a compelling communication vehicle for financial and operational concerns. Operation system can help them stay fully informed of every incident as the details of every individual action will be available to them in explained form. It will help their decision-making process as well for taking prompt action.

No matter a company's size or purpose, it’s valuable to have a dedicated organizational-level team whose job is to constantly monitor security operations and incidents and respond to any issues that may arise. The main goals of SOC into the operation is to increase the effectiveness of detecting threats in the organization’s environment.

But that’s not enough.

This includes prevention technology for all threat entrance and exit avenues, regular vulnerability scanning, pen testing, user authentication and authorization, asset management, external application testing, and remote access management.

Next-generation Firewalls

Traditional firewalls aren’t intelligent enough to distinguish different kinds of web traffic. Protection based on ports, protocols, IP addresses is no longer feasible. Businesses needs a more robust form of security that wasn't just tied to the IP addresses.

Next-generation firewalls also include integrated intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion protection systems (IPS) that detect attacks based on traffic behavioral analysis, threat signatures or anomalous activity. Next-generation firewall devices monitor traffic from layer 2 through layer 7 and are intelligent enough to determine what exactly is being sent or received and includes antivirus and malware protection that's continuously upgraded automatically whenever new threats are discovered.

But before you decide to purchase a firewall for your protection, you need to see and check what best suits your organization. To help you choose, DCT offers free Proof of Concept that lets you use our network appliances for free to better understand your requirements!

Cyber Security Awareness Training

Security awareness training has become an extremely valuable tool that companies can use in combating against security risks. No matter how you protect your valuable assets, it will still be useless if your personnel do not know or understand how to maintain confidentiality of information, or how to secure it appropriately. The human factor is a major aspect of protecting your business. Human behavior can make or break a hacker’s attempt at exploiting company information. Employees should receive information about who to contact if they discover a security threat instead of handling it on their own and be taught that data is a valuable corporate asset. Help them to recognize the threats and vulnerabilities to their company’s information assets and respond to them appropriately including detailing the countermeasures that can be adopted.

Penetration Test or Pen Testing

Understanding who you are defending against and how they will attack you is crucial. Penetration Test will give you the insight to see where the flaws are in your cyber security posture and highlight the problem. The purpose of a penetration test is to identify key weaknesses in your systems and applications, to determine how to best allocate resource to improve the security of your application, or organisation as a whole.

Security Information and Event Management

SOCs typically are based around the underlying principles of every SIEM system, to aggregate relevant data from multiple sources, web site assessment and monitoring systems, application and database scanners and take appropriate action.

For example, when a potential issue is detected, a SIEM might log additional information, generate an alert and instruct other security controls to stop an activity’s progress. While traditional malware detection, IDS and IPS, and other tools might not be enough alone, each one of them can play an important part in helping detect potential abuse or piecing together fingerprints during an investigation.

Backup and Recover

Backups are typically performed on a daily basis to ensure necessary data retention. Disaster recovery requires a separate production environment where the data can live. Backups are useful for immediate access in the event of the need to restore a document. The overall benefits and importance of a disaster recovery plan are to mitigate risk and downtime, maintain compliance and avoid outages.

Cloud Backup Protection

Cloud based data backup solutions are built around the most advanced technologies that includes data mirroring and file syncing. With cloud data backup your data is encrypted for transfer from one end to another to ensure increased data security.

If the data on your machine is backed up and stored out of reach from hackers, ransomware is little more than nuisance. So, bad guys have started attacking backup files because regular backups are the ultimate defense against ransomware.

Cyber attacks will continue to occur daily and security incidents becoming more costly. A SOC gives an organization the ability to anticipate and respond more quickly to threats in order to avoid heavy loss to the company and to help improve their security operations proficiency, efficacy, and quality, in order to keep their cyber incident under control. ut it requires a commitment and accountability, highly skilled individuals and much advanced tools needed.
Without it, the SOC can never realize its full potential.