What is SecOps?

SecOps, short for security operations, is a cybersecurity discipline that focuses on the processes and strategies used to defend data, assets, and infrastructure from known and unknown adversaries. The organization’s IT security team works collaboratively with other teams to reduce cybersecurity risks, improve operational efficiency, and speed the company’s response to attacks and incidents.

The overall mission of a SecOps team is to protect the company’s digital and physical assets and ensure the digital safety of its employees by identifying, assessing, and mitigating security threats and vulnerabilities, ensuring compliance with security policies and regulations, and rapidly responding to and recovering from security incidents. Within this mission, the primary aim of such programs is typically to safeguard data, which can include anything from sensitive data to intellectual property to customer information.

SecOps is a long-term collaboration between the two traditionally separate security and operations teams. This starts at a very basic level — the teams need to be using the same integrated tools and platforms to gain a unified view of the organization’s attack surface.

The teams also need to have shared processes, especially around incident response, security governance, policy development, and planning. This ensures they approach a critical shared goal — maintaining a secure IT environment — in the same manner.

This is made possible by carrying out cross-training, where members from both teams attend sessions to better understand each other’s roles, responsibilities, and objectives.

There is a natural conflict, of course, between security teams, whose goal is to protect vital IT systems and data, and IT operations teams, who aim to rapidly deploy new applications and services. SecOps seeks to overcome organizational and cultural barriers, reducing inefficiencies and conflicts by integrating security into IT processes. Through SecOps, the responsibility for mitigating threats and risks is distributed, with operations and security professionals collaborating closely to minimize vulnerabilities while maintaining business flexibility.

A single breach can have widespread ramifications that adversely impact an organization for years. In the absence of an effective SecOps practice, adversaries can take advantage of siloed departments within an organization — going unnoticed under the noise of over-alerted security detection tools, over-extended analysts, and disjointed response workflows — to capture sensitive data.

We've seen countless examples over the years of headline-grabbing security incidents in a variety of ugly forms — widespread vulnerabilities … ransomware attacks … server and data breaches. A serious security breach to an organization can not only result in the immediate fees, fines, and compensation to those affected, but also major costs associated with rehauling the system to bring it back online (securely), reputational damage, operation disruption, loss of intellectual property, and more. Effective SecOps helps organizations avoid the costs and disruption incurred by an incident.

1. Reduced risk of damaging incidents

The integrated approach of SecOps reduces risk by ensuring that threats are thwarted as quickly as possible. It also enhances their ability to detect, investigate, and respond to security threats rapidly by standardizing and streamlining key SecOps tasks. This includes using both prebuilt detection rules and machine learning to automatically detect attacks with AI insights and automation to accelerate response.

2. Enhanced operational efficiency

By encouraging and facilitating collaboration between the security and IT operations teams, processes are streamlined and communications far more efficient. By improving workflows through automating processes, these teams can expedite incident response and enhance threat detection. This improved operational efficiency makes it easier to allocate resources and make informed decisions faster and with more confidence, reducing the need for manual intervention and oversight throughout the process.

3. Reduced downtime and operational disruptions

The rapid detection and swift containment of potential incidents with SecOps ensures business continuity through minimized downtime. Operational efficiency is the unsung hero here — it’s only when a breach hits that organizations come to realize just how disruptive it is to reallocate resources, employee focus, and all-out efforts to salvage a broken system. SecOps plays a crucial role in ensuring uninterrupted business operations by making security incidents less common and severe — thereby sustaining productivity, revenue streams, and customer satisfaction.

Several SecOps tools have been developed to assist security teams in effectively operating the Security Operations Center (SOC).

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

A SIEM solution serves as the central workspace for many members of your SecOps team. It enables SecOps teams to rapidly detect and respond to cyberattacks by centrally collecting diverse environmental data, analyzing it through both analyst-driven and automated methods, and responding via built-in workflows and automations. Recently, the integration of generative AI and advancements in machine learning have further evolved SIEM capabilities, streamlining migration from legacy platforms and guiding analysts through triage and incident response workflows.

Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP)

Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) solutions help SecOps teams aggregate, correlate, and analyze threat context from a variety of internal and external sources, giving you a wide view of the threat landscape and helping you anticipate potential threats and adversarial tactics. When you have an up-to-date list of existing and emerging threats, you can know exactly what to look for and how to detect attacks as quickly as possible. This data also helps you and your team understand current threats, prioritize detected vulnerabilities, and proactively improve defenses. Essentially, it’s a constantly evolving knowledge base of potential threats and emerging dangers.

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR)

SOAR platforms can be thought of as security-centric versions of IT service management (ITSM) tools, providing multi-tier SecOps workflows and automation capabilities to streamline response. They play a key role in SecOps by enabling you to design response workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and improve response times — all across your existing security tools.

SecOps, DevOps, and DevSecOps are terms for blends of distinct domains, teams, and processes.

SecOps: Security and IT operations teams work together to improve security posture by introducing and improving security practices, enhancing threat detection, sharpening investigations, and shortening response times.

DevOps: Focuses on bringing together the operations team with the software development teams. This usually has an emphasis on continuous integration and continuous delivery, as well as using automation to build and deploy software quickly and reliably. The main goal here is to make software development faster and easier, without sacrificing reliability.

DevSecOps: A combination of the two above, where security practices are integrated into the DevOps workflow. This means that security becomes a shared responsibility through the development process, rather than being an afterthought. The goal of this approach is to identify and address vulnerabilities as early as possible in the development cycle to reduce risk and improve the overall security.

The SecOps team consists of highly skilled IT and security experts who monitor threats and assess risks throughout an organization. They are crucial to the operation of the SOC (security operations center), which encompasses the people, processes, and tools used to protect the organization from cyber threats. SecOps teams and sub-teams operate from the SOC, which serves as a hub, either physical, virtual, or both.

The size and roles of a SOC team can vary widely, based on the organization's size and needs. A very small organization might have only a few non-dedicated staff buttressed by SecOps services from a managed security services provider (MSSP). On the other end of the spectrum, the largest SOC teams can be extraordinarily large and globally distributed to enable fast, 24x7 response.

Key SOC roles include:

• Security engineers, who manage and maintain the security infrastructure, ensuring that tools and systems are correctly configured and optimized.
• SOC analysts, who are responsible for real-time monitoring and analysis of security events to detect and respond to incidents.
• Incident responders, who handle the identification, investigation, and resolution of security incidents, coordinating with other team members as necessary.
• Threat hunters, who proactively search for hidden threats within the organization's network.
• SOC manager or director, who oversees the overall operations of the SOC, ensuring effective collaboration and efficiency.

Additional roles may include an IT operations manager, responsible for integrating security operations with IT functions, and system administrators, who ensure the smooth running of IT systems and support the security team.

Integration and automation

For a smooth SecOps implementation, integrations and automations are your best friends. Where you can, have your systems talking to each other, or at least all pointing into a centralized system. Automation will save your SecOps team lots of time and effort, freeing them up to focus on making iterative improvements to your processes.

AI insights

Effectively leveraged generative AI can guide analysts through step-by-step workflows and help them understand what to do next. AI also helps reduce alert fatigue by prioritizing and contextualizing alerts, streamlining investigation and response processes. AI increases the efficiency and effectiveness of security operations, helping to modernize defenses against sophisticated cyberattacks.

Threat intelligence and other context

Don't underestimate the importance of threat intelligence. As a rule, you should use this information to define and redefine your incident response plan. Basically, you need to know what's out there, and have a clear plan for how you’ll deal with it.

Cross-departmental collaboration

SecOps only works if teams are unified, communicate regularly, train together, and share the same goals. This ensures your security measures are integrated into both teams, in all aspects of your business operations.

Elastic Security modernizes SecOps with AI-driven security analytics, accelerating SecOps workflows, and reducing risk. With limitless scalability, advanced analytics, and generative AI insights, the solution eliminates blind spots, strengthens defenses, and helps address the global cyber skills shortage.

Learn more about how Elastic Security modernizes SecOps.

• AI for security operations teams
• AI-driven SIEM solution & security analytics
• SIEM Buyer's Guide