Companies depend on the Security Operation Centre (SOC) to tackle, respond and mitigate threats to their cyber-infrastructure. Maintaining a SOC, however, is not an easy job. While meeting the daily requirements, the team members also need to stay updated with the latest cybersecurity threats and technologies. This workload often results in employee burnouts and high costs. These issues have prompted many organizations to move towards security operations centers as service providers.
What makes SOC as a service so valuable?
The Security Operation Centre of an organization has a central role in its IT infrastructure management. It is analogous to the brain, which serves many functions and has a lot of responsibilities. The SOC for a company includes people, technologies, and processes that help practically implement the theoretical security strategies into the real world for your organization’s cyber-security and threat protection.
Obviously, SOC being such a critical component of a company’s cyber security management, most would be reluctant to outsource this service.
However, doing so can have various benefits:
● Minimized costs
● Reclaimed SOC team bandwidth
● Best and most sophisticated tech (with continual monitoring)
● Minimized turnover (and its associated administration)
● Forefront cyber-threat intelligence
- Minimized costs
When it comes to managing a SOC, the costs involved are very significant. There is a lot of expenditure on implementations, technologies, solutions, and most of all – personnel. Putting the wrong solutions or tools for an organization’s cybersecurity can considerably affect its bottom line when going for purchasing a replacement (mainly when the vendor demands minimum length contracts and licensing). From the employees’ perspective, the salary increments received year-over-year by the members of the SOC team look absolute. Various organizations, however, believe their return of investment of their SOC is dropping continuously. It is claimed by 51% of the responding organizations that their rate of investment is decreasing, which is a very significant jump from the past years. Organizations often blame management complexity for being the reason behind this apparent return of investment decrease. The issue can be tackled easily by outsourcing security operations. The outsourcing will transfer some or even all of the complexity and its associated expenses onto the Managed Security Service Provider who have access to the latest cyber threat intelligence, security expertise, and the best technologies to tackle these issues.
- Reclaimed SOC team bandwidth
There is a need to balance job responsibilities on employees. It mostly happens that tasks with lesser priority or longer timelines are left for later and never looked back at. Keeping into mind the burnout norm for SOC teams, the stretch in deadlines proves to be counterproductive. Choosing the right MSSP will shorten everyone’s to-do list and help fill in the SOC’s different tiered roles. With a better team bandwidth, organizations can prioritize SOC responsibilities more effectively with more scope to dedicate time resulting in better executions. Outsourcing the organization’s SOC will keep the employees’ workload manageable.
- Best and most sophisticated tech with continual monitoring
With new cybersecurity threats that continue to emerge daily with the aim to undermine an organization, the right MSSP can provide IT infrastructure services and help equip the organization’s SOC with the most modern, sophisticated, and up-to-date security technologies and tools for monitoring. An adept MSSP will be able to provide the organization with the best advice, implementation, and proceeding management for their entire infrastructure of cybersecurity.
But the fact remains that putting to use the best Security Operations tech for an organization only meets a part of the SOCs responsibilities. There is no permanent solution for anything in the world of cybersecurity. Hence, the organization’s SOC will have to keep up with the latest threats and potential attacks. However, this takes money and resources since the SOC staff will need to be on a constant rotation. This issue can be sorted by outsourcing some or maybe all of the monitoring responsibilities to an MSSP who can keep a lookout on your IT environment throughout the day. With an MSSP and their continual monitoring, any incidents or eventualities detected by the monitoring system will instantly initiate the process of notification, detection, response, and recovery.
4. Minimized turnover (and its associated administration)
The job of being part of a SOC team is very demanding. A 2021 survey by Ponemon Institute collected responses on organizations’ SOC expenses, which stated that almost nine out of ten team members consider their jobs to be “Painful or Very painful.” The percentage has only risen over the past couple of years as per the survey. In the case of SOCs, turnover and burnout aren’t simply common.
They’re what the employees have started expecting overwhelmingly. Handling the challenge posed by this frequent churn of employees is a significant burden on the organizations. This issue falls outside of the daily responsibilities of the SOC team. The field requires expertise and goes without saying it is neither convenient nor cheap. Managers from the SOC team will have to dedicate their time to this hiring and get significantly overtaxed in due time. The correct MSSP partner can help the organization cut short these issues and dedicate more time towards their actual tasks.
5. Forefront cyber-threat intelligence
The only universal fact in the world of cybersecurity is that threats keep on evolving continuously. It is a cycle that keeps on repeating itself where Security Operations and mitigation tactics continually evolve and adapt to gain an advantage over the other. The threat becomes even more imminent since organizations’ SOC teams keep focused on checking off their daily tasks and eventually have less time to keep up with the trends of emerging threats and mitigation techniques against them.
Outsourcing the functionalities to an MSSP will help your organization keep pace with the latest methods of cybercriminals, thereby reducing the burden on your organization. The security services will be handled and taken care of by professionals who are already adept with the existing incursion techniques, patterns, and characteristic indications and those of upcoming successors.
Takeaway
Choosing the right MSSP partner will not only help the organization function better in terms of cyber security but will also reduce the workload on the SOC team significantly, thereby providing them with valuable time to keep themselves updated and utilize time and resources in a better, more efficient way.
