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What is a security operations center (SOC)?

Learn how security operations center teams rapidly detect, prioritize, and triage potential cyberattacks.
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What is a SOC?

A SOC is a centralized function or team responsible for improving an organization’s cybersecurity posture and preventing, detecting, and responding to threats. The SOC team, which may be onsite or outsourced, monitors identities, endpoints, servers, databases, network applications, websites, and other systems to uncover potential cyberattacks in real time. It also does proactive security work by using the latest threat intelligence to stay current on threat groups and infrastructure and identify and address system or process vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them. Most SOCs operate around the clock seven days a week, and large organizations that span multiple countries may also depend on a global security operations center (GSOC) to stay on top of worldwide security threats and coordinate detection and response among several local SOCs.

Functions of a SOC

SOC team members take on the following functions to help prevent, respond, and recover from attacks.

Asset and tool inventory

To eliminate blind spots and gaps in coverage, the SOC needs visibility into the assets that it protects and insight into the tools it uses to defend the organization. This means accounting for all the databases, cloud services, identities, applications, and endpoints across on-premises and multiple clouds. The team also keeps track of all the security solutions used in the organization, such as firewalls, anti-malware, anti-ransomware, and monitoring software.

Reducing the attack surface

A key responsibility of the SOC is reducing the organization’s attack surface. The SOC does this by maintaining an inventory of all workloads and assets, applying security patches to software and firewalls, identifying misconfigurations, and adding new assets as they come online. Team members are also responsible for researching emerging threats and analyzing exposure, which helps them stay ahead of the latest threats.

Continuous monitoring

Using security analytics solutions like a security information enterprise management (SIEM) solution, a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solution, or an extended detection and response (XDR) solution, SOC teams monitor the entire environment—on-premises, clouds, applications, networks, and devices—all day, every day, to uncover abnormalities or suspicious behavior. These tools gather telemetry, aggregate the data, and in some cases, automate incident response.

Threat intelligence

The SOC also uses data analytics, external feeds, and product threat reports to gain insight into attacker behavior, infrastructure, and motives. This intelligence provides a big picture view of what’s happening across the internet and helps teams understand how groups operate. With this information, the SOC can quickly uncover threats and fortify the organization against emerging risks.

Threat detection

SOC teams use the data generated by the SIEM and XDR solutions to identify threats. This starts by filtering out false positives from the real issues. Then they prioritize the threats by severity and potential impact to the business.

Log management

The SOC is also responsible for collecting, maintaining, and analyzing the log data produced by every endpoint, operating system, virtual machine, on-premises app, and network event. Analysis helps establish a baseline for normal activity and reveals anomalies that may indicate malware, ransomware, or viruses.

Incident response

Once a cyberattack has been identified, the SOC quickly takes action to limit the damage to the organization with as little disruption to the business as possible. Steps might include shutting down or isolating affected endpoints and applications, suspending compromised accounts, removing infected files, and running anti-virus and anti-malware software.

Recovery and remediation

In the aftermath of an attack, the SOC is responsible for restoring the company to its original state. The team will wipe and reconnect disks, identities, email, and endpoints, restart applications, cut over to backup systems, and recover data.

Root cause investigation

To prevent a similar attack from happening again, the SOC does a thorough investigation to identify vulnerabilities, poor security processes, and other learnings that contributed to the incident.

Security refinement

The SOC uses any intelligence gathered during an incident to address vulnerabilities, improve processes and policies, and update the security roadmap.

Compliance management

A critical part of the SOC’s responsibility is ensuring that applications, security tools, and processes comply with privacy regulations, such as the Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA). Teams regularly audit systems to ensure compliance and make sure that regulators, law enforcement, and customers are notified after a data breach.

Key roles in a SOC

Depending on the size of the organization, a typical SOC includes the following roles:

Director of Incidence Response

This role, which is typically only seen in very large organizations, is responsible for coordinating detection, analysis, containment, and recovery during a security incident. They also manage communication with the appropriate stakeholders.

SOC Manager

Overseeing the SOC is the Manager, who typically reports to the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Duties include supervising personnel, running operations, training new employees, and managing the finances.

Security Engineers

Security Engineers keep the organization’s security systems up and running. This includes designing the security architecture and researching, implementing, and maintaining security solutions.

Security Analysts

The first responders in a security incident, security analysts, identify threats, prioritize them, and then take action to contain the damage. During a cyberattack they may need to isolate the host, endpoint, or user that has been infected. In some organizations Security Analysts are tiered based on the severity of the threats they are responsible for addressing.

Threat Hunters

In some organizations, the most experienced Security Analysts are called Threat Hunters. These people identify and respond to advanced threats that are not picked up by automated tools. This is a proactive role designed to deepen the organization’s understanding of known threats and uncover unknown threats before an attack has taken place.

Forensic Analysts

Larger organizations may also hire Forensic Analysts, who gather intelligence after a breach to determine its root causes. They are looking for system vulnerabilities, violations of security policies, and cyberattack patterns that may be useful in preventing a similar compromise in the future.

Types of SOCs

There are a few different ways organizations set up their SOCs. Some choose to build a dedicated SOC with a full-time staff. This type of SOC can be internal with a physical on-premises location, or it can be virtual with staff coordinating remotely using digital tools. Many virtual SOCs use a combination of contract and full-time staff. An outsourced SOC, which also may be called a managed SOC or a security operations center as a service, is run by a managed security service provider, who takes responsibility for preventing, detecting, investigating, and responding to threats. It’s also possible to use a combination of internal staff and a managed security service provider. This version is called a comanaged or hybrid SOC. Organizations use this approach to augment their own staff. For example, if they don’t have threat investigators it might be easier to hire a third party rather than try to staff them internally.

Importance of SOC teams

A strong SOC helps businesses, governments, and other organizations stay ahead of an evolving cyberthreat landscape. This is no easy task. Both attackers and the defense community frequently develop new technologies and strategies, and it takes time and focus to manage all the change. Using its knowledge of the broader cybersecurity environment as well as its understanding of internal weaknesses and business priorities, a SOC helps an organization develop a security roadmap that aligns with the long-term needs of the business. SOCs can also limit the business impact when an attack does occur. Because they are continuously monitoring the network and analyzing alert data, they are more likely to catch threats earlier than a team that’s spread among several other priorities. With regular training and well-documented processes, the SOC can address a current incident quickly—even under extreme stress. This may be difficult for teams that don’t focus on security operations all day, every day.



Benefits of a SOC

Benefits of a SOC

By unifying the people, tools, and processes used to protect an organization from threats, a SOC helps an organization more efficiently and effectively defend against attacks and breaches.

Strong security posture

Improving an organization’s security is a job that’s never finished. It takes continuous monitoring, analysis, and planning to uncover vulnerabilities and stay on top of changing technology. When people have competing priorities, it’s easy for this work to be neglected in favor of tasks that feel more urgent.

A centralized SOC helps ensure that processes and technologies are continuously improved, reducing the risk of a successful attack.

Compliance with privacy regulations

Industries, states, countries, and regions have varying regulations that govern the collection, storage, and use of data. Many require organizations to report data breaches and delete personal data at a consumer’s request. Having the right processes and procedures in place is as important as having the right technology. Members of a SOC help organizations comply by taking ownership of keeping the technology and data processes up to date.

Rapid incidence response

It makes a big difference how quickly a cyberattack is discovered and shut down. With the right tools, people and intelligence, many breaches are stopped before they do any damage. But bad actors are also smart about staying under cover, stealing massive amounts of data, and escalating their privileges before anyone notices. A security incident is also a very stressful event—especially for people inexperienced in incidence response.

Using unified threat intelligence and well-documented procedures, SOC teams are able to detect, respond, and recover from attacks quickly.

Decreased costs of breaches

A successful breach can be very expensive for organizations. Recovery often leads to significant downtime, and many businesses lose customers or struggle to win new accounts shortly after an incident. By getting ahead of attackers and responding quickly, a SOC helps organizations save time and money as they get back to normal operations.

Best practices for SOC teams

With so many responsibilities, a SOC must be effectively organized and managed to achieve results. Organizations with strong SOCs implement the following best practices:

Business-aligned strategy

Even the most well-funded SOC has to make decisions about where to focus its time and money. Organizations typically start with a risk assessment to identify the greatest areas of risk and the biggest opportunities for the business. This helps identify what needs to be protected. A SOC also needs to understand the environment where the assets are located. Many businesses have complex environments with some data and applications on-premises and some across multiple clouds. A strategy helps determine whether security professionals need to be available every day at all hours, and if it’s better to house the SOC in-house or use a professional service.

Talented, well-trained staff

The key to an effective SOC is a highly skilled staff that’s continuously improving. It starts with finding the best talent, but this can be tricky because the market for security staff is highly competitive. To avoid a skills gap, many organizations try to find people with various expertise, such as systems and intelligence monitoring, alert management, incident detection and analysis, threat hunting, ethical hacking, cyber forensics, and reverse engineering. They also deploy technology that automates tasks to enable smaller teams to be more effective and boost the output of junior analysts. Investing in regular training helps organizations retain key staff, fill a skills gap, and grow people’s careers.

End-to-end visibility

Because an attack can start with a single endpoint, it’s critical that the SOC have visibility across an organization’s entire environment, including anything managed by a third party.

The right tools

There are so many security events that teams can easily get overwhelmed. Effective SOCs invest in good security tools that work well together and use AI and automation to elevate significant risks. Interoperability is key to avoid gaps in coverage.

SOC tools and technologies

Security information and event management (SIEM)

One of the most important tools in a SOC is a cloud-based SIEM solution, which aggregates data from multiple security solutions and log files. Using threat intelligence and AI, these tools help SOCs detect evolving threats, expedite incident response, and stay ahead of attackers.

Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR)

A SOAR automates recurring and predictable enrichment, response, and remediation tasks, freeing up time and resources for more in-depth investigation and hunting.

Extended detection and response (XDR)

XDR is a software as a service tool that offers holistic, optimized security by integrating security products and data into simplified solutions. Organizations use these solutions to proactively and efficiently address an evolving threat landscape and complex security challenges across a multicloud, hybrid environment. In contrast to systems like endpoint detection and response (EDR), XDR broadens the scope of security, integrating protection across a wider range of products, including an organization’s endpoints, servers, cloud applications, emails, and more. From there, XDR combines prevention, detection, investigation, and response to provide visibility, analytics, correlated incident alerts, and automated responses to improve data security and combat threats.

Firewall

A firewall monitors traffic to and from the network, allowing or blocking traffic based on security rules defined by the SOC.

Log management

Often included as part of a SIEM, a log management solution logs all the alerts coming from every piece of software, hardware, and endpoint running in the organization. These logs provide information about network activity.

Vulnerability management

Vulnerability management tools scan the network to help identify any weaknesses that could be exploited by an attacker.

User and entity behavior analytics

Built into many modern security tools, user and entity behavior analytics uses AI to analyze data collected from various devices to establish a baseline of normal activity for every user and entity. When an event deviates from the baseline, it’s flagged for further analysis.

SOC and SIEM

Without a SIEM it would be extremely difficult for a SOC to achieve its mission. A modern SIEM offers:

  • Log aggregation: A SIEM collects the log data and correlates alerts, which analysts use for threat detection and hunting.
  • Context: Because a SIEM collects data across all the technology in the organization, it helps connect the dots between individual incidents to identify sophisticated attacks.
  • Fewer alerts: By using analytics and AI to correlate alerts and identify the most serious events, a SIEM cuts down on the number of incidents people need to review and analyze.
  • Automated response: Built-in rules allow SIEMs to identify probable threats and block them without the interaction of people.
It’s also important to note that a SIEM, alone, is not enough to protect an organization. People are needed to integrate the SIEM with other systems, define the parameters for rules-based detection, and evaluate alerts. This is why defining a SOC strategy and hiring the right staff is critical.

SOC solutions

There is a wide array of solutions available to help a SOC defend the organization. The best ones work together to provide complete coverage across on-premises and multiple clouds. Microsoft Security provides comprehensive solutions to help SOCs eliminate gaps in coverage and get a 360-degree view of their environment. Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-based SIEM that integrates with Microsoft Defender extended detection and response solutions to give analysts and threat hunters the data they need to find and stop cyberattacks.



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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

  • A network operation center (NOC) focuses on network performance and speed. It not only responds to outages but also proactively monitors the network to identify issues that could slow traffic. A SOC also monitors the network and other environments, but it is looking for evidence of a cyberattack. Because a security incident can disrupt network performance, NOCs and SOCs need to coordinate activity. Some organizations house their SOC within their NOC to encourage collaboration.
  • SOC teams monitor servers, devices, databases, network applications, websites, and other systems to uncover potential threats in real time. They also do proactive security work by staying up to date on the newest threats and identifying and addressing system or process vulnerabilities before an attacker exploits them. If the organization suffers a successful attack, the SOC team is responsible for removing the threat and restoring systems and backups as necessary.
  • A SOC is made up of people, tools, and processes that help protect an organization from cyberattacks. To achieve its goals, it carries out the following functions: inventory of all assets and technology, routine maintenance and preparedness, continuous monitoring, threat detection, threat intelligence, log management, incident response, recovery and remediation, root cause investigations, security refinement, and compliance management.
  • A strong SOC helps an organization more efficiently and effectively manage security by unifying defenders, threat detection tools, and security processes. Organizations with a SOC are able to improve their security processes, respond faster to threats, and better manage compliance than companies without a SOC.
  • A SOC is the people, processes, and tools responsible for defending an organization from cyberattacks. A SIEM is one of many tools that the SOC uses to maintain visibility and respond to attacks. A SIEM aggregates log files and uses analytics and automation to surface credible threats to members of the SOC who decide how to respond.

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