Opinion: SOC-as-a-Service (SOCaaS) – a compelling alternative

Opinion: SOC-as-a-Service (SOCaaS) – a compelling alternative

Sherif Shaltout vice president operations, Cysiv Middle East & Africa addresses the key frustrations facing security operations operatives and how SOC-as-a-Service can help solve them 

Enterprises are constantly adopting new tools and technologies to make threat detection and response more efficient. However, these solutions need to be regularly optimised to keep up with the increased attack surface and the overwhelming volume of data in the present-day security operations centre (SOC).

The typical security operations team receives an average of 11,000 daily alerts, according to “The 2020 State Of Security Operations” report. Analysts are ignoring or turning off alerts because there’s too much noise and too many false-positives. At the worst, businesses have suffered a data breach or a cyberattack that should have been caught and stopped.

Without additional technologies, specialised expertise and significant resources to implement and manage, the traditional SOCs fail to deliver the results or value they were expected to provide. This leads to a lot of frustration.

SOC-as-a-Service (SOCaaS), which combines a next-gen SIEM with a team of experts to provide 24/7 threat detection and response, is a compelling alternative to overcome the limitations of the traditional SOC.

Here are six common SOC frustrations and how emerging SOCaaS addresses them.
Frustration 1: Legacy architecture – Built on a cloud-native, next-generation SIEM platform, SOCaaS eliminates the disruptions and management complexities of traditional SOC and enables rapid scaling and better resiliency.

Frustration 2: Limited functionality – SOCaaS combines key capabilities, including SIEM, SOAR, UEBA, and a threat intelligence platform, into a single, unified SaaS offering to improve the speed and efficiency of the detection and investigation process.

Frustration 3: Unsupported data sources – Threat detection and response is only as good as the data you have. A SOCaaS provider with a vendor- and data source-agnostic model provides native support for critical data sources and telemetry. The vendor’s platform immediately ingests your data and improves the breadth, quality, and confidence of threat detection, reducing dwell time and enabling analysts to quickly detect and respond to hidden, evasive, and emerging threats.

Frustration 4: Weak analytics – SOCaaS providers rely on a next-generation SIEM platform purpose-built for the modern SOC. Threat detection and investigation combines data science and automation, a blend of threat detection methods, and contextual enrichment along with threat intelligence to dramatically reduce false positives and accelerate detection and response.

Frustration 5: Lack of experts – Traditional SOC is not sustainable if you can’t dedicate substantial staff resources to deploying, managing, and monitoring the platform. The strength of SOCaaS is not only the technology but also the expertise that comes with it. As a co-managed service, you can have as much control as you’d like without the expense of in-house staff to deploy, operate, and maintain the platform.

Frustration 6: Slow time to value -Traditional SOC often take a year or longer to fully configure and implement. SOCaaS takes very little to deploy, can be done quickly and remotely, and can be fully operational in as little as one month.

  • These traditional SOC frustrations led Cysiv to develop its own cloud-native, co-managed, multi-tenant SOC platform.
    To find out more visit: www.cysiv.com