What is a SOC (Security Operations Center)?

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An organization’s complete IT infrastructure is monitored around-the-clock by a SOC, which is typically pronounced “sock” and is also known as an information security operations center, or ISOC. Its goal is to quickly identify, evaluate, and address security incidents. The SOC team can keep an eye on the company’s networks, systems, and applications thanks to this coordination of cybersecurity tasks, which also guarantees a proactive defense posture against online attacks.

Along with choosing, managing, and maintaining the company’s cybersecurity tools, the SOC also continuously examines threat intelligence to identify methods to strengthen the security posture of the enterprise.

When not on-site, a SOC is frequently included in outsourced managed security services (MSS) provided by a managed security service provider (MSSP). The primary advantage of running or outsourcing a SOC is that it integrates and manages an organization’s security system, including security tools, practices, and reaction to security incidents.

This usually leads to better preventative measures and security policies, faster threat detection, and a faster, more effective, and cost-effective response to security risks. A SOC can also boost customer confidence by simplifying and strengthening an organization’s compliance with industry, national, and international privacy requirements.

What Does a Security Operations Center (SOC) do?

SOC activities and responsibilities fall into three general categories.

Preparation, planning and prevention

Asset inventory: A SOC must keep an exhaustive inventory of everything that needs to be protected, both inside and outside the data center (for example, applications, databases, servers, cloud services, endpoints, etc.) and all of the tools used to protect it (firewalls, antivirus/antimalware/anti-ransomware tools, monitoring software, etc.). Many SOCs will use an asset discovery tool to do this task.

Routine maintenance and preparation: To enhance the efficiency of existing security tools and measures, the SOC performs preventive maintenance such as deploying software patches and upgrades, as well as regularly upgrading firewalls, allowlists and blocklists, and security rules and procedures. The SOC can also make system backups—or assist with developing backup policies or procedures—to protect company continuity in the event of a data breach, ransomware attack, or other cyberattack routine.

Incident response planning: The SOC is in charge of establishing the organization’s incident response plan, which specifies activities, roles, and duties in the case of a threat or incident, as well as the metrics used to assess the success of any incident response.

Regular testing: The SOC team conducts vulnerability assessments, which are complete assessments of each resource’s vulnerability to potential or emerging threats, as well as the associated costs. It also runs penetration tests to simulate specific assaults on one or more systems. Based on the findings of these tests, the team improves or refines applications, security policies, best practices, and incident response strategies.

Staying current: The SOC stays up to date on the latest security solutions and technologies, and on the latest threat intelligence—news and information about cyberattacks and the hackers who perpetrate them, gathered from social media, industry sources and the dark web.

Monitoring, detection and response

Continuous, round-the-clock security monitoring: The SOC monitors the entire extended IT infrastructure—applications, servers, system software, computing devices, cloud workloads, and the network—24/7/365 for indications of known exploits and suspicious activities.

Many SOCs have relied on security information and event management, or SIEM, as their primary monitoring, detection, and response technology. SIEM monitors and combines real-time alarms and telemetry from network software and hardware, analyzing the data to identify potential threats. Recently, several SOCs have embraced extended detection and response (XDR) technology, which provides more detailed telemetry and monitoring while also automating incident detection and response.

Log management, or the collecting and analysis of log data created by every network event, is a critical component of monitoring. While most IT departments collect log data, it is the analysis that determines normal or baseline activity and identifies abnormalities that suggest suspicious activity. In fact, many hackers rely on the fact that corporations do not always review log data, allowing their viruses and malware to remain undiscovered on the victim’s systems for weeks or even months. Most SIEM solutions provide log management capabilities.

Threat detection: The SOC team separates the signals from the noise—the signs of true cyberthreats and hacker activity from the false positives—and then triages the threats based on severity. Modern SIEM solutions contain artificial intelligence (AI), which automates these processes and ‘learns’ from data to improve its ability to detect suspicious activities over time.

Incident response: When a threat or incident occurs, the SOC takes action to mitigate the harm. Actions may include:

Root cause investigation, to determine the technical vulnerabilities that gave hackers access to the system, as well as other factors (such as bad password hygiene or poor enforcement of policies) that contributed to the incident.
Shutting down compromised endpoints or disconnecting them from the network.
Isolating compromised areas of the network or rerouting network traffic.
Pausing or stopping compromised applications or processes.
Deleting damaged or infected files.
Running antivirus or anti-malware software.
Decommissioning passwords for internal and external users.

Many XDR solutions enable SOCs to automate and accelerate these and other incident responses.

Recovery, refinement and compliance

Recovery and remediation: Once an incident has been contained, the SOC eliminates the threat and works to restore impacted assets to their pre-incident state (for example, wiping, restoring, and reconnecting disks, user devices, and other endpoints; restoring network traffic; restarting applications and processes). In the event of a data breach or ransomware attack, recovery may also include switching to backup systems and resetting passwords and authentication credentials.

Post-mortem and refinement: To avoid a repeat, the SOC leverages any new intelligence gleaned from the incident to improve vulnerability mitigation, update processes and policies, select new cybersecurity technologies, or amend the incident response plan. At a higher level, SOC team might also try to determine whether the incident reveals a new or changing cybersecurity trend for which the team needs to prepare.

Compliance management: It is the SOC’s responsibility to ensure that all applications, systems, security tools, and processes adhere to data privacy regulations such as GDPR (Global Data Protection Regulation), CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), and HIPAA. Following an event, the SOC ensures that users, regulators, law enforcement, and other parties are properly alerted, and that the incident data is maintained for evidentiary and auditing purposes.