Five Key Considerations for SOC Modernization

CISOs must consider security transformation, and in doing so, they must consider every process and layer of the security technology stack. For security efficacy and operational efficiency, organizations require SOC modernization.

While businesses have accomplished a lot while operating remotely over the last two years, cybersecurity is still in jeopardy in 2022 . At this moment, the scale and complexity of prior security defenses are either ineffective or overburdened. This means that CISOs must consider security transformation, and every process and layer of the security technology stack must be considered.

This is where the Security Operations Centers (SOC) modernization comes in. In cybersecurity, SOCs are where the proverbial rubber meets the road. SOC analysts are responsible for detecting threats quickly, investigating them to determine their scope and blast radius, and disrupting cyber-attacks to prevent or minimize damage. It works with IT operations to fully restore business/IT operations and then uses these teachable moments to strengthen defenses.

Considerations for SOC modernization planning

Cybersecurity issues are prompting CISOs to develop SOC modernization initiatives. They must think about the following when they construct their plans:

The SOC architecture: 

The SOC architecture is evolving from today’s disparate tools to tomorrow’s interoperable technological architecture. Whether it’s a cybersecurity mesh or security operations and analytics platform design, diverse technologies like EDR, NDR, SIEM, TIP, and SOAR must be tightly integrated. A modern SOC, which combines threat researchers, SOC analysts, and incident responders, is referred to as a fusion center by some corporations. This mash up will only function if the SOC architecture is open and changeable.

Scale and performance: 

As the saying goes, all data is security data. To put it another way,  SOCs  collect, process, and analyze terabytes of data from various sources to analyze for security learning. It could be security tools, IT infrastructure components, apps, CSPs, SaaS vendors, identity stores, threat intelligence feeds, and other sources to determine whether they are facing risk of assault. This necessitates a backend that is extremely scalable, capable of ingesting real-time data feeds, and delivering acceptable response times for complicated queries. The cloud is the best solution for that.

Also Read: Five Key Steps to Bolstering Cybersecurity Maturity

While technology providers have improved their ability to produce detection rule content, SOC teams require better tools for quickly generating, amending, and sharing custom rule sets.

Deception Technology: 

Modern deception technology is capable of comprehending an organization’s assets, identities, and data and then simulating them through the creation of authentic lures and decoys. The most effective deception systems perform a significant amount of work on their own. With ransomware posing a threat to corporate activities, it’s past time for SOC modernization to include deception technology as a layer of defense.

Risk-based context: 

Security analysts must determine whether an asset is a test/development server or a cloud-based workload hosting a business-critical application when it is under attack. SOC modernization combines threat, vulnerability, and business context data for analysts to get this perspective.

Continuous testing: 

A commitment to continuous improvement is part of SOC modernization. Understanding threat actor behavior, confirming that security defenses can withstand modern attacks, and strengthening any defensive gaps are all part of this process. For this reason, CISOs are leaning toward continual red teaming and purple teaming. Vendors will see increased demand for continuous testing and attack path management products as a result of SOC modernization.

SOC modernization allows CISOs to review and re-engineer security processes in order to make them more automatable. It delivery more than technology upgrade; it enables enterprises to rethink security skills and roles while enabling a distributed workforce.