What is a Security Operations Center (SOC)?
Security operations center (SOC) definition
A security operations center (SOC) is the core cybersecurity function that monitors and protects an organization's data, infrastructure, and transactions. A SOC unifies and coordinates all cybersecurity processes, technologies, and operations to detect and respond to cyber threats in real-time, around the clock.
The SOC serves as a hub that can be physical, virtual, or both. Usually comprised of IT and security experts, an efficient SOC team is equipped with tools to protect potential cyber threat vectors such as networks, systems, devices, and applications. Going beyond reactive detection and responses, a modern SOC solution integrates the latest
insights of vulnerabilities, attack vectors, and threat actor behavior to proactively protect against emerging risks.
Why is a SOC necessary?
A SOC is necessary to protect an organization's assets, maintain compliance mandates, and retain an upstanding business reputation. Customer trust is paramount, and maintaining robust cybersecurity measures requires a dedicated SOC staffed by experienced security professionals equipped with the right tools to keep systems secure at all times.
24/7 monitoring and threat detection
A SOC continuously monitors an organization's environment for suspicious activities and potential breaches. By analyzing logs, network traffic, and endpoint data in real-time, security analysts can quickly detect and respond to incidents.
Proactive threat hunting
Using pattern recognition tools such as machine learning, SOC teams employ proactive threat hunting to identify the most sophisticated and stealthy threats of today.
Rapid incident response
With rapid incident response times, a strong SOC can ensure faster remediation of security incidents. Thanks to artificial intelligence and generative AI, some incident response workflows can be automated to further minimize potential damage.
Compliance
A SOC helps an organization stay compliant with data protection regulations and industry standards. In the event of a data breach, a SOC team ensures the right procedures are followed and potential legal repercussions are avoided.
Cost savings
By preventing or minimizing damage from an attack, an effective SOC ultimately reduces the expense and time associated with the downtime, recovery, and reputational damage of a significant breach.
Core SOC functions
SOC teams are responsible for building and maintaining an organization's security posture. How? Everything from preventing attacks, monitoring, detecting, and responding to incidents — plus recovery and remediation.
Core SOC functions include:
- Continuously monitoring the organization’s IT environment for anomalies
- Developing and implementing security policies
- Identifying and managing vulnerabilities
- Threat hunting
- Vendor, technology and third-party management
- Continuous monitoring of the entire environment
- Reducing the attack surface
- Reviewing and implementing threat intelligence
- Detecting threats
- Responding to security incidents
- Enforcing security policy
- Root cause analysis and security improvement
- Compliance management
Key components of a security operations center
The key components of a security operations center are the people, the processes, and the technology used to protect an organization from cyber threats.
SOC team structure
The size and roles of a SOC team varies based on the organization's size and needs. A very small organization might have only a few non-dedicated staff and rely on a SOC as a service (SOCaaS) or a managed security service provider (MSSP) to cover all of the core functions. A managed SOC offers cutting-edge protection without the burden of upfront infrastructure costs and the need to hire skilled professionals.
For some organizations, however, an in-house SOC team is within reach. The largest SOC teams can include dozens of staff, distributed around the world — forming a global security operations center (GSOC) consisting of several regional SOCs to enable a coordinated worldwide, 24/7 response.
Key roles and SOC responsibilities
A SOC team can include a SOC manager, security analysts, security engineers, system administrators, threat hunters, and incident responders.
- A SOC manager oversees SOC operations, taking the lead on projects to ensure collaboration, efficiency, and alignment with broader strategic goals.
- Security engineers manage and maintain the security infrastructure, ensuring that tools and systems are correctly configured and optimized.
- Security analysts are responsible for real-time monitoring across networks and analyzing security events to detect and respond to incidents.
- Incident responders handle the identification, investigation, and resolution of security incidents. Usually, these are the senior security analysts who have the experience to work on more time-sensitive and challenging issues.
- Threat hunters proactively search for hidden threats within the organization's network. They are typically the most experienced security analysts.
- System administrators ensure the smooth running of IT systems and support the SOC team.
SOC technologies and tools
SOC technologies and tools are essential to security teams for various tasks. Some common SOC technologies and tools include:
- Security information and event management (SIEM) for continuous monitoring, log management, advanced detection, threat hunting, incident response, and compliance.
- SOAR, or security orchestration, automation, and response, for automated and streamlined incident response and remediation workflows.
- Extended detection and response (XDR) for accurate threat detection and quick response.
- Threat intelligence knowledge bases for aggregating, correlating, and analyzing threat context from a variety of internal and external sources, for a clearer view of the threat landscape.
- Vulnerability scanners for discovering, investigating, and patching vulnerabilities.
- Log monitoring for searching and analyzing log data.
Biggest SOC challenges
The biggest SOC challenges often occur as organizations adjust and expand their operations. New infrastructure, software, and personnel each introduce new threat vectors that need to be monitored by the SOC. Maintaining strong security practices in this constantly fluctuating environment is no easy task. Some of the biggest SOC challenges (and potential solutions) include:
Skills shortage
A shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals and difficulty finding experienced security analysts leads to under-resourced departments.
Solution: Leveraging AI to alleviate the manual tasks security analysts are faced with can be a huge help. AI in security can guide analysts through triage, investigation, and response workflows, help security admins with data onboarding, and more.
Alert fatigue
One of the common challenges for new or smaller SOC teams: an overwhelming volume of alerts — including false positives — all requiring attention, triage, and manual intervention.
Solution: AI-driven security analytics significantly reduces the noise and prioritizes critical alerts, saving teams time and effort.
Dynamic threat landscape
The security landscape is constantly changing, making it harder for SOC teams to keep up with emerging and advanced threat actors, new vulnerabilities, and attack techniques.
Solution: Leveraging in-depth and diverse threat intelligence sources that encompass many different vulnerability types can be a game changer.
See how Elastic Security can help your organization centralize security operations
SOC best practices
SOC best practices ensure your security operations (SecOps) are running smoothly. Efficient SOC teams will focus on preventing threats rather than just responding to them for better threat response capabilities.
Automation
Automating routine tasks frees your SOC team up to focus on proactive protection measures and process improvements. Automating workflows enables smaller teams to be more effective and boosts the output of junior analysts. Automation also speeds up incident response processes when automatically triggered during triage.
AI insights
The right tools are essential. Today, generative AI, AI-driven analytics, and machine learning are exactly those tools. Effectively leveraging generative AI can guide security 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, and streamlining investigation and response processes. Similarly, machine learning can help sift through vast amounts of logs and security data and identify outliers.
Threat intelligence and visibility
End-to-end visibility is critical for a strong SOC. Switching between various tools — each responsible for a different system vector — can introduce gaps in analysis and additional risk.
Cross-departmental alignment
A SOC is at the forefront of integrating security measures into all business operations across the organization, making the business more resilient in the long term. SOC teams perform risk assessments to identify the potential areas of risk as well as business opportunities, quantifying the resources needed to protect the organization's assets.
It's important to develop an organization-wide, top-down security strategy, and maintain consistent communication across teams and departments. Aligning the SOC strategy with business goals helps an organization to succeed.
How to modernize your SOC with Elastic
Elastic Security empowers your team to detect threats sooner, investigate faster, and respond decisively. Modernize SecOps with AI-driven security analytics and powerful AI capabilities embedded throughout the UI — as well as novel threat research from Elastic Security Labs integrated into the unified platform.
With limitless scalability, AI-driven analytics, and generative AI insights, Elastic eliminates blind spots and data silos, bolsters defenses, stops threats quickly and helps address the skills shortage. Your team can address complex threats and substantially improve its defense against todays dynamic threat environment with Elastic Security, powered by the Elastic Search AI Platform.