Establishing a Modern SOC: Strategic Considerations for Effective Cybersecurity Management

Begin with an overview of the increasing complexity of cybersecurity threats and the vital role that a SOC plays in an organization's security posture. Emphasize the importance of a SOC in monitoring, detecting, and responding to cyber incidents in real-time. It is important to understand SOC is not something that you build and forget, it requires constant attention to make sure that provides benefits, it aligns with latest threats, it automates low hanging fruits to prevent burnout and you have a way to track business process improvement needs to move from reactive to proactive SOC.

1. Understanding the Business Case for a SOC

• Aligning with Business Objectives: Discuss how a SOC should align with broader business goals and the necessity of defining clear success criteria. SOC should have clear business goals in mind, what you, as organization are trying to achieve while establishing SOC.
• Cost-Benefit Analysis: Explore the financial implications, including potential cost savings from preventing major breaches versus the operational costs of running a SOC.

2. Assessing the Threat Landscape

• Identifying Threats: Outline the process of identifying the specific threats the organization faces, which will guide the SOC's focus and operations. With the rise of MITRE ATT&CK it becomes easier to leverage threat intelligence and build detection and preventions with specific threats that are relevant to you.
• Risk Assessment: Explain the importance of risk assessment in determining the priority and resources allocated to different types of threats. Risk assessment will allow to make informed decisions in log source selections based on threat relevancy and risk to your organization.

3. Architectural Decisions: In-House vs. Outsourced SOCs

• In-House SOC: Discuss the advantages of having an in-house SOC, such as better control over processes and data.
• Hybrid SOC: Consider the benefits of a hybrid approach, where certain functions are managed internally while others are outsourced.
• Fully Outsourced SOC: Analyze when it makes sense to outsource the SOC entirely, and the importance of maintaining some internal expertise. However, i will add a caveat, even if you decide to outsource, i highly recommend having at least 1-2 internal SOC analyst who can provide business context as well as manage bidirectional work towards continuous improvement.

4. The Role of Technology and Expertise

• Leveraging Cloud SIEM: Detail the role of cloud-based Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems in modern SOCs and how they can be optimized for cost and performance.
• Expertise Needs: Whether in-house or outsourced, underline the importance of having skilled professionals who can interpret data and manage the SOC effectively. This task is very important, because modern SIEMs costs are based on data ingestion, so having expertise by your side to be able to weed out unneeded logs, tailor them based by relevance can save you considerable amount of funds.

5. Ensuring Effective Collaboration with External Partners

• Accountability and Engagement: Stress the importance of keeping external partners accountable and the necessity of active engagement to ensure the SOC evolves with the threat landscape.
• Internal Expertise: Advocate for maintaining a small team of internal SOC analysts who provide essential business context to enhance the effectiveness of the SOC.

6. Continuous Improvement and Validation

• Testing and Validation: Explain the critical need to regularly test and validate security controls provided by the SOC, using both penetration testing partners and tools.
• Feedback Loop: Describe the continuous improvement cycle of a SOC, emphasizing the iterative process of tuning, adjusting, and upgrading security measures.

Conclusion

I have seen numerous amounts of SOC that have been built and forgotten, run by your MSSP partners without continuous maturity assessment and evaluation, will over time become something that will only provide false sense of security, instead actual threat prevention. I have evaluated and tested SOCs that had no clue that their internal networks and applications have been breached. So make sure you leverage experienced partners who can help in MSSP selection, threat alignment, use case development, continuous maturity improvement and assessment of the SOC to make sure it is up to par based on threats and risks your organization face. If you need any help, please do reach out! Also if you wish to further leverage MITRE ATT&CK and understand why we need to move all the way to the top of the pyramid of pain, reach out or check out my Youtube channel, that has in depth videos about the topic @mpcybersecurity.