As many IT systems are Increasingly exposed to various threats, companies put IT security as a top priority, and for good reason. Ransomware and data theft are occurring every day, really every minute in our highly technical landscape.
To protect your systems from these malicious threats, a comprehensive layered security approach should be taken to fortify your Information Technology with multiple protections to reduce a potential breach. One critical layer in this approach is implementing a managed SOC.
Security Operations Center (SOC) is now a crucially essential part of security protection plan that reduces the level of exposure of information systems to both external and internal risks.
What is SOC?
SOC refers to a dedicated platform and team to prevent, detect, assess and respond to cybersecurity threats and incidents. In other words, the SOC will collect events from different security components, analyze them, identify anomalies, and define response procedures for alerts.
The SOC, which relies on multi-expert skills, thus occupies a strategic role for the security of your Information Systems. Using the analytics, it provides continuous actions in terms of improvement and makes it possible to reinforce the security governance of the company.
Why you need IT
Without SOC services, cyber-criminal attacks can remain hidden for a long time as companies do not have skills to detect and respond to threats in a timely manner. It’s these unknown and unidentified threats that cause the most harm to businesses.
Thus, a SOC will allow companies to have a better visibility on their environment, have skills, processes and continuous improvement. With more and more regular attacks, many organizations are refocusing their security efforts on prevention and detection.
The main benefits of a SOC in summary:
Improved threat management
Companies regularly deploy a variety of security technologies designed to prevent and detect threats, as well as to strengthen and protect assets. For maximum efficiency, they must be centralized, standardized, correlated and monitored in real time, with resources available to analyze and respond to suspicious activities and incidents.
Incidents are often likely to span multiple entities and this requires coordinated actions to reduce risk. A SOC perfectly meets all these requirements.
With SOC, organizations will have greater speed in identifying attacks and remedying them before it cause more damages.
Maintenance of regulatory compliance
A SOC also helps you to meet regulation requirements that require security monitoring, vulnerability management, or an incident response function.
Centralization and consolidation of security functions
Consolidating security functions in a SOC can save money, enable cost-sharing and ultimately create economies of scale, while maximizing expertise, skills and resources available.
Managed SOC as a Service
To protect themselves from today’s cyber threats, most companies set up a Security Operations Center (SOC) with trained staff and costly technology, as well as all the constant training and maintenance that go with it.
But SOC is often not an option because of its constraints and costs of implementation. Using an external third party “Managed” SOC is a reliable and efficient solution with a reasonable cost while benefiting from a high level expertise and skills.
Functions typically offered by an external Managed SOC
- Integration and supervision of company’s traffic flows
- 24×7 Continuous threat monitoring of equipment and security solutions (often using a SIEM)
- Real-Time Investigation and Threat Hunting
- Management of vulnerabilities reported by an automated analysis tool
- Sorting and prioritizing alerts
- Implementation of adapted responses and threat isolation
- Analysis of the cause of the incident
- Corrective/Remediation actions (ex: updates, configuration changes, etc.).
To summarize, having a SOC allows you to have dynamic security that acts as a true security layer for analysis, monitoring, prevention and remediation.
CONTACT US TODAY to learn more how PCS can implement a Managed SOC solution for your company to add this vital layer of protection.
