The Nature of Emerging Cyber-Threats
Remote work, global interconnectivity, and the digital attack surface have significantly increased the complexity of businesses’ IT perimeters. New cybersecurity methods are required for emerging technologies like the Internet of Things, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and 5G. The global shortage of trained cybersecurity employees and limited experience in safeguarding data are exacerbated by the cybersecurity crisis. Advanced cyberweapons, dark web forums, and resource sharing pose significant threats to criminal syndicates and state actors. Improved Security Operations Centers (SOC) capabilities are necessary for businesses to manage, monitor, and react to cybersecurity threats.
How effective is the Security Operations Center (SOC)?
An efficient SOC may handle physical security, business systems, and control systems. It is meant to provide constant threat mitigation, detection, and prevention systems. Moreover, SOC teams find vulnerabilities, mitigate risks, and manage incidents that could be taking place on company networks or systems. The ability of analysts and the security team to quickly and accurately understand and respond to threats determine how successful a SOC will be.
What are the benefits of the Security Operations Center (SOC)?
1. Enhanced Security Posture: While continually monitoring for security threats and vulnerabilities and taking appropriate action to mitigate them, a SOC boosts an organization’s security posture. This can aid in preventing security problems and protecting the assets of the company.
2. Improved Visibility: A SOC gives security experts a consolidated overview of the company’s security posture, making it simple for them to understand what’s going on across its networks, systems, and applications.
The Security Operations Center’s Importance (SOC)
The importance of SOCs is a global issue, and the European Community has just passed a new law that acknowledges the importance of the SOC function. By improving detection, preparedness, and reaction to serious or catastrophic events, the proposed EU Cyber Solidarity Act seeks to boost cybersecurity. Adding cutting-edge national and international Security Operations Centers (SOCs) charged with identifying and responding to cyber threats creates a European Cybersecurity Shield and a Cyber Emergency Mechanism.
Improve SOC capabilities and functions with new SOC products and solutions
SOC technologies have drawn a lot of attention from companies looking to improve cybersecurity. The significance of SOCS for cybersecurity is also being discussed at events and conferences as the threat matrix expands. Here are a few examples of products and solutions in various SOC operations domains that can improve SOCs and their operators in the upcoming years.
A New Molecular Set of Solutions Leveraging Connected Interfaces, Automation, and AI to Help SOC Operators
AI-enabled security solutions are available through IBM’s QRadar Suite to optimize and speed up threat detection, investigation, and response procedures. This complete package combines security data and response procedures with SOC analyst toolkits and is provided as a SaaS, enabling companies to choose and adapt solutions for their specific needs.
It is crucial to train SOC staff
Several institutions focus on SOC certifications; the following two are detailed.
1. The SANS Institute, which was founded in 1989, was created with the goal of giving cybersecurity professionals the skills and expertise they need to improve the world. They provide materials for SIEM, Elastic Stack, and modern detection methods in addition to SOC training certificates.
2. CompTIA offers SOC analyst certification training while fighting for the global information technology industry and the 75 million people that work in its development and maintenance.
Strategies for SOC Risk Management
1. Security by Design is the starting point for any risk management strategy, particularly for those who are software or hardware developers worried about security. Moreover, the DHS CISA recently released a plan for both the corporate and governmental sectors to improve security by developing a specific strategy.
2. Defense in Depth. In the security world, there are several solid definitions of defense in depth. According to a NIST document, the Defense-in-depth idea is “an important security design framework that has considerable relevance to industrial control systems (ICS), cloud services, sensitive data storage, and many other sectors.”
3. Zero-trust (ZT) is a cybersecurity model in which defenses are shifted from static edges to users, assets, and resources. Zero-trust architecture (ZTA) plans industrial and corporate infrastructure and processes based on zero-trust principles. It makes no assumptions about implicit confidence provided to assets or user accounts based on physical or network locality or asset ownership. Zero-trust protects resources rather than network segments and can help a company’s overall information technology security posture.
Conclusion
The cutting-edge technologies displayed at RSA and other events to address cybersecurity problems will be a huge help to the security operations center (SOC) in 2023. Businesses, governments, and organizations must be proactive in developing the capabilities of security operations centers, which means being aware of the resources that are available and the operational needs.
