Defend your business from cyberattacks with SOC-as-a-service

Dubai - Proactive security leaders are now exploring modern SOCaaS to augment their existing security team and strategy

A successful cyberattack can be crippling to an organisation. Lost sales, service disruptions, regulatory fines, falling share prices, brand damage and stolen intellectual property are all common consequences. Today’s threat actors, including cybercriminals, nation states, hacktivists and insiders, are highly motivated. They have the expertise, are armed with a constantly evolving set of tools and can exploit a range of vulnerabilities to bypass existing defences and accomplish their objectives.

Most CIOs and security leaders now accept that a breach is not an 'if', but a 'when'. And although breaches can happen very quickly, they can take many months to detect. The longer it takes to detect it, the more expensive and damaging it can be. This is why many organisations have recognised the importance of establishing a security operations centre (SOC) that’s focused on detecting and responding to attacks as a core part of their defence strategy.

Unfortunately, the time, cost and expertise required to build, staff and operate a modern 24/7 SOC — one that leverages data science, automation, cloud computing and threat hunting to better handle today’s IT realities and threat landscape — is beyond the means of most organisations. And those that already have a SOC, or rely on a managed security service provider for these functions, are trying to figure out how to cost-effectively modernise it, to improve its effectiveness, efficiency and reach. Thankfully, there’s a new approach that can address the needs of both types of enterprises. It’s called SOC-as-a-service, or SOCaaS.

SOCaaS becomes an organisation's modern SOC. Like so many other technologies and services these days, it is delivered from the cloud and it addresses each of the trends noted above. The vendor’s team of skilled cyber experts — data scientists and engineers, security analysts, incident responders, threat hunters and researchers — leverage a modern technology platform to provide around the clock monitoring for threats. They operate as a seamless, remote extension to the customer’s IT and security team, or existing SOC team, constantly communicating with it to collaborate on the end-to-end investigation and response process and to continually elevate the organization’s security posture and resilience.

The SOCaaS platform is really the key to being able to intelligently process and correlate data and telemetry from across the enterprise, including on-premises, remote, data centre, multi-cloud and IoT/OT environments, to quickly and consistently find the threats that warrant deeper human investigation. The platform combines essential technologies — SIEM, data lake, data science/ML, user entity behaviour analytics, security orchestration automation and response, a threat intelligence platform, case management, and persona-based dashboards — into a single, unified SaaS that is constantly updated with new rules and features.

SOCaaS, with predictable and flexible billing options, can often be operational in a few weeks. There’s no staff to hire, no technology to licence or integrate, and it leaves organisations to focus on other security priorities. Customers get peace of mind knowing that a team of professionals equipped with the right tools is continuously on the lookout for anything suspicious that might get past their other defences, and leave them scrambling to defend themselves.

Proactive security leaders are now exploring modern SOCaaS to augment their existing security team and strategy. It can help better manage and reduce cyber risk and meet compliance requirements, while improving SOC efficiency, reducing costs and overall resilience. And, it can help ensure they don’t end up as headline news because of a successful cyberattack.

The writer is CEO and co-founder of CYSIV. Views expressed are his own and do not reflect the publication's policy.