How to Build A SOC For Your Organisation

Do you want to build a SOC? Establishing a Security Operations Centre (SOC) is increasingly seen as a cornerstone of an effective cyber security strategy. A SOC serves as the nerve centre for an organisation’s security operations. It provides the capabilities needed to monitor, detect, and respond to threats in real time.

However, building an in-house SOC is no small feat. It involves significant investment. From extensive planning to a deep understanding of both the technological and human components, there are several components required to create a functional and efficient security operation.

This blog will walk you through the comprehensive steps needed to build a SOC. We address the intricate challenges you might encounter along the way. We’ll also explore why many organisations find a Managed SOC to be a more practical and effective solution, offering the benefits of expert management, cost efficiency, and cutting-edge technology – all of which are key features of the Managed SOC services provided by ConnectProtect.

This guide aims to help you make informed decisions about the best approach for securing your organisation.

What are the benefits of a Security Operations Centre?

A SOC serves as the central hub for an organisation’s cyber security efforts. Its primary purpose is to monitor, detect, investigate, and respond to cyber threats around the clock. By consolidating these activities into a dedicated team and facility, a SOC enhances an organisation’s ability to defend against a wide range of threats, from malware and phishing attacks to insider threats and advanced persistent threats (APTs).

Having explored the purpose and benefits of a SOC, we’ll now guide you through the detailed steps to building one for your organisation. This includes everything from assembling the right team to implementing the necessary technology, ensuring you establish a solid foundation for effective security operations

How To Build Your Own SOC

Step One: Define the Purpose and Scope of Your SOC

Before diving into the technicalities, it’s essential to establish a clear purpose and scope for your SOC. This foundational step will dictate the direction of your SOC’s development and operation.

1. Objective Setting

The first step is to define what you want your SOC to achieve. Are you primarily focused on threat detection, incident response, regulatory compliance, or a combination of these objectives? The SOC’s objectives should align with your organisation’s broader security strategy and business goals.

2. Scope Definition

Once you’ve established your objectives, you need to define the scope of the SOC. This involves identifying the specific systems, networks, and data assets that the SOC will monitor and protect. Will the SOC cover internal networks only, or will it also monitor external threats? Will it be responsible for protecting cloud environments, endpoints, or both? Clear scope definition is crucial to ensure that your SOC is neither overextended nor underutilised.

Step Two: Assemble a Skilled Team

The effectiveness of a SOC is heavily reliant on the skills and expertise of its personnel. Building a strong team is one of the most challenging and critical aspects of SOC development.

1. Roles and Responsibilities

A fully functional SOC requires a variety of roles, each with specific responsibilities:

• SOC Manager: Oversees the overall operation, ensures processes are followed, and reports to higher management.
• Security Analysts: The frontline operators who monitor alerts, analyse potential threats, and escalate incidents as necessary.
• Incident Responders: Specialists who take charge when a security incident occurs, coordinating the response and mitigation efforts.
• Threat Hunters: Proactively search for signs of potential threats and vulnerabilities that automated systems might miss.
• Forensic Analysts: Responsible for investigating and analysing security breaches to understand how they occurred and prevent future incidents.
  

Recruiting for these roles is a significant challenge due to the global shortage of cyber security talent. Organisations must not only attract skilled professionals but also retain them. This can be done through ongoing training, professional development opportunities, and a supportive work environment.

2. Training and Development

Cyber threats evolve rapidly, and so too must the skills of your SOC team. Continuous training is essential. This includes obtaining relevant certifications such as Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), and Global Information Assurance Certification (GIAC). Regular training sessions, simulated attack exercises, and participation in industry conferences are all crucial for keeping your team’s skills sharp and up-to-date.

Step Three: Design the SOC Architecture

The architecture of your SOC will form the backbone of your security operations. This step involves selecting and integrating the right technologies, setting up the necessary infrastructure, and ensuring that all components work together harmoniously.

1. Technology Selection

Selecting the right tools is critical to the success of your SOC. The key components typically include:

• – Security Information and Event Management (SIEM): A centralised platform for collecting and analysing data from across your network. SIEM systems are vital for detecting anomalies and correlating events that may indicate a security incident.
• – Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS): These tools monitor network traffic for signs of malicious activity and take action to block threats.
• – Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR): Focuses on monitoring and securing individual endpoints such as computers, mobile devices, and servers.
• – Threat Intelligence Platforms: Aggregate data from various sources to provide insights into emerging threats and help the SOC stay ahead of attackers.

Integration is key—these tools must work together seamlessly to provide comprehensive coverage and quick response times.

2. Infrastructure Planning

The physical or virtual infrastructure of your SOC is another crucial consideration. For on-premises SOCs, this includes secure, controlled environments with the necessary hardware, such as servers and network appliances. If you opt for a virtual or cloud-based SOC, you’ll need to consider factors like cloud security, scalability, and redundancy.

Designing your SOC’s layout also involves considering the workflow of your team. A well-designed SOC should facilitate efficient communication and collaboration between team members, whether they are working in the same room or remotely.

Step Four: Develop Processes and Procedures

With your team in place and your technology selected, the next step is to develop the processes and procedures that will guide your SOC’s operations.

1. Incident Response Plan

An incident response plan is a detailed set of procedures that outlines how your SOC will detect, respond to, and recover from security incidents. This plan should include specific playbooks for different types of incidents. These include malware infections, data breaches, or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The goal is to ensure that when an incident occurs, your team knows exactly what steps to take to contain and mitigate the threat.

2. Monitoring and Reporting

Continuous monitoring is the heart of a SOC’s operation. Your SOC should be equipped to monitor network traffic, user activities, and system logs around the clock. This requires a combination of automated tools and human analysis to ensure that no threat goes undetected.

Reporting is another crucial aspect. Regular reports should be generated to keep stakeholders informed about the SOC’s activities, the threats encountered, and the effectiveness of the SOC’s response. These reports should be tailored to different audiences, from technical staff to senior management, providing the appropriate level of detail and context.

Step Five: Implement and Test Technology

Once your SOC architecture is designed, it’s time to implement and rigorously test your technology stack. This phase is where theory meets reality, and the effectiveness of your planning is put to the test.

1. Integration

Implementing your SOC’s technology involves more than just installing software and configuring hardware. It requires careful integration of all components to ensure they work together as a cohesive system. For example, your SIEM system should be able to ingest data from all relevant sources, correlate events, and trigger alerts based on predefined rules.

During this phase, you’ll need to conduct extensive testing to verify that all systems are functioning as expected. This includes testing the accuracy of your threat detection capabilities, the responsiveness of your incident management processes, and the overall performance of your SOC.

2. Automation and Orchestration

Wherever possible, automation should be used to reduce the burden on your SOC team and speed up response times. Common tasks that can be automated include log analysis, alert triage, and even certain aspects of incident response, such as isolating infected systems.

Orchestration tools can further enhance your SOC’s efficiency by coordinating actions across different systems. For example, if an IDS detects an anomaly, an orchestration tool could automatically trigger a response in your firewall or EDR system, reducing the time it takes to neutralise a threat.

Step Six: Operationalise the SOC

With your technology implemented and tested, the next step is to bring your SOC into full operation.

1. Shift Schedules and Staffing

One of the most challenging aspects of running a SOC is ensuring that it operates 24/7. This requires careful planning of shift schedules to ensure that your SOC is always staffed with qualified personnel, even during nights, weekends, and holidays. It’s also essential to build redundancy into your staffing plan, so that if a team member is unavailable, there is always someone else who can step in.

2. Threat Hunting and Intelligence

While much of a SOC’s work is reactive, responding to threats as they arise, proactive threat hunting is becoming increasingly important. This involves actively searching for signs of potential threats within your environment, often using advanced analytics and threat intelligence.

Threat intelligence is another critical component. By staying informed about the latest tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by attackers, your SOC can anticipate and prepare for potential threats before they materialise.

Step Seven: Implement Continuous Improvement

Cyber security is a constantly evolving field, and your SOC must evolve with it. Continuous improvement is essential to ensure that your SOC remains effective in the face of new and emerging threats.

1. Regular Drills and Testing

To keep your SOC operating at peak efficiency, it’s important to conduct regular drills and tests. These can include simulated attacks, known as red team exercises, which test your SOC’s ability to detect and respond to sophisticated threats. Drills should also test your incident response plans, ensuring that your team can quickly and effectively manage real-world incidents.

2. Metrics and Reporting

To measure the effectiveness of your SOC, you should establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and regularly review them. Common KPIs include the time it takes to detect and respond to threats, the percentage of incidents resolved within a given timeframe, and the overall number of incidents detected. By tracking these metrics, you can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions about how to enhance your SOC’s performance.

Step Eight: Ensure Compliance

Finally, your SOC must operate in compliance with relevant regulations and standards, which often requires regular audits.

1. Compliance Management

Depending on your industry, your SOC may need to comply with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Adherence to these regulations is non-negotiable, as non-compliance can result in significant fines and damage to your organisation’s reputation. Ensuring compliance involves maintaining detailed records of all security activities, implementing access controls, and regularly reviewing policies and procedures to ensure they meet current regulatory standards.

To assist with compliance management, many organisations implement Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) tools, which help in automating the documentation and audit processes. These tools can track compliance with multiple regulations and standards simultaneously, making it easier to manage the complex web of requirements that many organisations face.

2. External Audits

In addition to internal reviews, periodic external audits are essential to validate your SOC’s security posture and compliance with industry standards. External auditors bring an impartial perspective, identifying potential weaknesses or gaps in your security operations that might be overlooked internally. These audits can cover a range of aspects, including your incident response processes, the effectiveness of your security controls, and your overall adherence to regulatory requirements.

Preparing for an external audit requires meticulous documentation and a clear understanding of the audit criteria. This preparation ensures that your SOC is not only compliant but also capable of demonstrating its effectiveness and reliability to stakeholders and regulators.

The Challenges of Building and Maintaining an Internal SOC

While the steps outlined above provide a roadmap for building a SOC, the reality is that creating and maintaining an in-house SOC presents significant challenges. These challenges can be broadly categorised into costs, complexity, talent shortages, and the need for continuous adaptation.

High Costs

Building a SOC is a costly endeavour. The initial setup requires substantial investment in technology, infrastructure, and personnel. However, the costs don’t stop there. Ongoing expenses include software licensing, hardware maintenance, and the salaries of highly skilled professionals. For many organisations, these costs can be prohibitive, especially when considering the need to regularly update and upgrade technologies to keep pace with evolving threats.

Complexity and Integration

The complexity of integrating various security tools into a cohesive system cannot be overstated. Each tool in your SOC’s arsenal must be configured to work seamlessly with others, and this integration requires a high level of expertise. Moreover, the rapidly changing nature of cyber security means that your SOC must be continuously updated and refined, adding to the operational complexity.

Talent Shortage

The global shortage of cyber security talent is a well-documented issue. 71% of organisations in a 2023 ESG report stated that they’ve been impacted by the cyber security skills shortage. Finding, hiring, and retaining qualified SOC personnel is increasingly difficult, with demand far outstripping supply. This shortage often leads to high turnover rates, burnout, and increased salaries, further escalating the cost of maintaining an internal SOC.

24/7 Operations

A SOC must operate 24/7 to be effective, which requires a well-organised shift system and sufficient staffing to cover all hours. Managing around-the-clock operations is challenging, particularly in maintaining consistent levels of expertise and vigilance across all shifts. The need for constant monitoring also places additional strain on your team, contributing to burnout and turnover.

Keeping Up with Threats

The cyber threat landscape is constantly evolving, with new vulnerabilities, attack vectors, and tactics emerging regularly. An internal SOC must continuously adapt to these changes, which requires ongoing training, updates to incident response plans, and the integration of new technologies. This need for continuous improvement can be overwhelming, particularly for smaller organisations with limited resources.

Why a Managed SOC Might Be the Better Option?

Given these challenges, many organisations are increasingly turning to Managed SOC services as a more practical and cost-effective alternative. Managed SOCs offer several key advantages that make them an attractive option, particularly for organisations that lack the resources to build and maintain an in-house SOC.

Cost Efficiency

Managed SOC providers spread the cost of technology and expertise across multiple clients, making it possible for organisations to access advanced security capabilities without the substantial upfront investment required for an internal SOC. This model allows organisations to benefit from the latest security technologies and expertise at a fraction of the cost of building their own SOC.

Access to Expertise

Managed SOCs are staffed by teams of highly skilled professionals with deep expertise in cyber security. By choosing a Managed SOC, organisations gain immediate access to this expertise without the challenges of recruitment, training, and retention. This access ensures that your security operations are managed by experienced professionals who are well-versed in the latest threats and best practices.

Scalability

One of the key benefits of a Managed SOC is its scalability. As your organisation grows or as the threat landscape changes, a Managed SOC can easily scale its services to meet your evolving needs. This flexibility is particularly valuable for organisations that experience seasonal fluctuations in activity or that anticipate rapid growth.

Advanced Technology

Managed SOC providers typically use cutting-edge technology to deliver their services. These providers invest in the latest tools and platforms, ensuring that their clients benefit from state-of-the-art security capabilities. By opting for a Managed SOC, organisations can leverage these advanced technologies without the need for continuous investment in upgrades and updates.

24/7 Monitoring and Response

A Managed SOC operates around the clock, providing continuous monitoring and incident response services. This ensures that potential threats are identified and addressed in real-time, reducing the likelihood of a successful attack. For many organisations, the ability to rely on 24/7 coverage is one of the most compelling reasons to choose a Managed SOC.

To Build or Outsource?

Building an internal SOC requires significant investment, planning, and ongoing effort, which can be challenging for many organisations. Opting for a Managed SOC allows you to access advanced security capabilities without these burdens. ConnectProtect’s Managed SOC offers a comprehensive, scalable, and cost-effective solution, ensuring your organisation is protected against the constantly evolving cyber threat landscape.

ConnectProtect’s Managed SOC delivers all the benefits discussed, with a strong emphasis on tailored solutions to meet each client’s specific needs. Our proactive threat hunting leverages advanced analytics and threat intelligence to identify vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. We offer customised solutions aligned with your unique security needs, and our experienced team ensures top-tier protection. Seamless integration with your existing infrastructure is a priority, and our commitment to continuous improvement means we stay ahead of the latest threats. Get in touch with us today to discuss how ConnectProtect can safeguard your business.