As the cyberthreat landscape evolves at a rapid speed, the only way organizations can stay ahead of threat actors is by prioritizing their cybersecurity programs. They must also monitor and analyze their security posture on an ongoing basis to detect, prevent and respond to threats.
So here’s where a managed Security Operations Center (SOC) plays a vital role!
But what is a Managed Security Operations Centre you might ask?
Managed SOC – also known as SOC as a Service – is a service that enables organizations to “outsource” the SOC function to an external cybersecurity expert, who will help monitor your company’s cloud environment, IT network, devices, logs, applications and data for known and evolving vulnerabilities, threats and risks. They can provide proactive threat detection, immediate incident or alert response, and incident remediation.
It is dependent on a subscription model system where you can pay a monthly or yearly fee to prevent threats and to make sure that threats are being detected and accordingly responded to.
Why use a Managed Security Operations Centre?
In the first nine months of 2020, data breaches exposed 36 billion records, with the average breach costing $3.86 million. Today, that cost has risen to $4.24 million. So in this disquieting landscape, the role of a Security Operations Center cannot be overstated.
However, setting up the SOC in-house involves a significant investment in software, hardware and other infrastructure. It can also take a long time to build a team, obtain the necessary tools and licences, and configure the SOC. These can all be serious barriers, and can prevent the organization from strengthening its security posture.
With SOC as a Service, organizations can easily and cost-effectively eliminate these barriers.
So what are the benefits of a Managed Security Operations Centre?
#1: Around-the-clock Network Monitoring
When you choose a managed SOC you give a third party full responsibility for your security operations. This has many important benefits for your enterprise. The first and most important benefit is that you enjoy the around-the-clock support of security experts. This cost is even less than what it would cost to have around-the-clock in-house monitoring. With an MSSP (Managed Security Service Provider), you have security experts constantly monitoring your network.
To flag any abnormalities or suspicious activities in your network, a managed SOC will regularly monitor and scan your network. When any suspicious activity is detected, it will create instant alerts of emerging threats, allowing a team to prevent and mitigate the threats before any harm is done to your organization’s sensitive data. The Managed SOC’s team hence “teaches” systems the difference between regular day-to-day activities and actual threat behaviour by using behavioural analysis.
#2: Quick and Effective Response
Because SOC team members continuously monitor for threats, they decrease the amount of time elapsed between when the compromise first occurred and mean time to detection. Should anomalous activity be detected, SOC analysts investigate and verify the event is indeed an attack before working to contain it. The SOC team then begins incident response to determine the severity of the threats, eradicate them and remediate any ill effects.
#3: Decreased costs of Breaches and Operations
By minimizing the amount of time a cyber attacker lurks in an enterprise's network, the SOC team can reduce the effect of a breach and, therefore, the potential costs the breach may incur via data loss, lawsuits or business reputation damage. The longer an attacker remains in a system, the more potential damage can be done to the company.
In addition, SOC teams work diligently to minimize downtime and business disruption during an attack to prevent monetary losses.
#4: On-Demand Access to Security Experts
A security operations team of a Managed SOC often consists of an incident responder and security analyst, followed by the other specialized positions, such as security engineers, threat hunters, forensic investigators, and compliance auditors. All of these employees have a different set of skills, which, when combined with those of other SOC employees, is significant to detect, remediate, analyze and learn from threats.
These team members also have a wide knowledge of reliable and safe technologies for threat detection and prevention, such as Behavioral threat analytics, AI and machine learning, and cloud access security brokers, as well as the most advanced threat detection and prevention techniques.
You will thus have access to a pool of cybersecurity experts who are skilled at threat monitoring, assessment, response and remediation support. They can immediately start monitoring the IT environment for potential cyber threats and risks for ongoing, reliable protection.
#5: Proactive Threat Detection
All the enterprises that produce huge amounts of data often find it difficult to detect threats. As you can imagine, it is a time-consuming process to scan all data for malware, or other cyber-criminal activity. Managed SOC makes it easier for your organization to identify fraudulent activities. Apart from this, a managed SOC service provider will assure you that possible threats are proactively detected.
#6: Security Threat Prevention
SOCs are about more than just detecting incidents. The analysis and threat hunting conducted by SOC teams help prevent attacks from occurring in the first place. SOCs provide increased visibility and control over security systems, enabling the organization to stay ahead of potential attackers and issues.
SOC service providers provide different services as per your organization that will vary, from just providing threat detection and alerting services for you to act upon, to providing whole detection, protection, and threat hunting services. An MSSP can quickly protect your whole network from being compromised when provided as a service and a threat is detected. By communicating with other security systems in your network, the managed SOC service provider flags threats for those security systems in place as well. A lot of damage can be prevented by proactively protecting the system as a whole.
Did you know: eVantage Technology has been granted 2 new licenses from the CSRO!
We are pleased to announce that eVantage Technology has been granted two new licences from the Cybersecurity Services Regulation Office (CSRO):
Licence Name: Penetration Testing Service Licence
Licence Name: Managed Security Operations Centre Monitoring Service Licence
These two licences granted are part of a new framework launched on 11 April 2022 “to better safeguard consumer interests and to improve the information asymmetry between consumers and cyber security providers”.
It reflects eVantage's robust commitment to maintaining a world-class standard of excellence when it comes to protecting the online security of clients.
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