What is a security operations center (SOC)?

Cyber Security
#1

The information security team is housed in a security operations centre (SOC). This team is in charge of continually monitoring and analyzing the security of a company. The SOC team’s responsibilities include detecting, analyzing, and responding quickly to cybersecurity issues using a variety of technological solutions and methods. Security Analysts, Engineers, and Managers may be part of the team, which collaborates closely with the incident response team.

#2

A “Security Operation Center” or “SOC” is a collection of people, technology and processes acting together as a centralized command center for defending an organization from the risks and detecting the vulnerable sides of the system in place by detecting, intercepting, analyzing and responding to all types of attacks, keeping the security structure of the system updated and healthy.

A SOC brings together the whole of organization’s IT setup together, including its networks, appliances, devices and servers and databases, and all types of assets. It is the center of correlation where the events from all over the system are logged, monitored and decisions made to respond to any such event as deemed necessary.

The task of the team handling SOC generally comprises of monitoring, detecting, investigating, and responding to the risks and threats all round the clock, protecting the intellectual property of the organisation, business systems, personnel data through top notch coordination between the team members responsible for various departments.

The architecture of the SOC can be typically called as that one of a “hub and spoke” , where an SIEM (For further information on SIEM, please refer “ What is SIEM and what are its advantages? “) acts as the aggregator and correlator between different parts, represented by spokes that incorporate a number of systems that are at risk of getting attacked and the events of these attacks are getting reported and stored at the SIEM. Other main parts of the architecture include intrusion prevention setups, scanners, and entry behavior analyzers.

The Team is generally headed by a professional called as SOC manager, who is aided by responders, who act whenever an incident occurs, analysts at various levels, threat analyzers and hunters. The SOC manager is answerable to the Chief Information Security Officer or CISO.