Top challenges Security Operations Center (SOC) teams face every day

Apart from the unknown challenges of identifying attacks, SOC teams constantly face issues that alter their ability to perform at their optimum best.

Security Operations Center (SOC) around the world are watching over critical infrastructure, giving assurance and comfort of being cyber safe. SOC teams go to battle every day, hoping for consistency in their analysis and trusting their skill and ability to defend. It’s a high-pressure environment, and being backed up is a constant state of mind. Apart from the unknown challenges of identifying attacks, SOC teams constantly face issues that alter their ability to perform at their optimum best.

Let’s look at the top five challenges SOC teams face every day. This guide may serve well for organizations that design SOC, as most issues can be solved if the right process is followed.

Increasing volume of security alerts

With the number of security alerts received growing every year, significant analyst time is spent going through them. They spend a lot of crucial time assessing the credibility of the warnings that frequently result in alerts getting missed or those with more serious repercussions sliding through the cracks. As expected, analysts’ time gets spent on finding ways to reduce the time between breach detection and resolution.

 

Budget constraints and ever-increasing costs

Most businesses, large or small, face budget constraints. A clear positive ROI must be forecasted and/or approved before spending. It is difficult to evaluate, monitor, and manage security operations and incident response, so justifying spending is always a challenge.

Organizations are increasing their investment in cyber security measures in response to an increase in the number of cyber-attacks, but how much is essential and how much outweighs the benefits? Can one put a figure on the implications of a hypothetical incident like a data breach knowing that it almost certainly faces a fine, as well as, damage to the brand and reputation?

 

Managing a myriad of tools

As SOCs embrace a greater range of security suites, it becomes increasingly challenging to efficiently monitor all of the data provided by the growing number of data points and sources. A typical Security Operations Center (SOC) may include a mix of 20 or more technologies, which can be challenging to track and manage separately. To successfully manage, monitor, and measure security operations and incident response procedures, it is critical to have a central source and single platform to consolidate all of the information as it is created and to have a helicopter view of the complete security environment.

 

Shortage of skills and knowledge

Skills shortages are another issue. When a business is unable to hire to fill a security skills gap, existing employees are left to fill the void. They rise to the occasion, but not without difficulty. For example, if a SOC team is unable to effectively use monitoring and management technologies to intervene in threats, slower reactions and failed responses are likely. Staff must find their way to the appropriate functions to diagnose incidents and then intervene, resulting in slower responses.

Not knowing enough hinders the ability to perceive the threat at hand. Moreover, SOC teams might receive more false positive and false negative responses and waste time tracking them down.

 

Uncertainty about the mission

SOCs tend to be unsure about their core mission and may not have a clear idea as to which business assets are most important to protect. SOCs must have a clear understanding of what they are expected to protect and why for increased efficiency.

 

Takeaway

SOC analysts are the first line of defense for any organization, and they can properly secure the data with proper resources, methodologies, and training. By addressing these five challenges, organizations can experience improved security operations proficiency, efficacy, and quality in order to keep cyber incidents under control.

 

Written By Shomiron Das Gupta, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of DNIF HyperScale SIEM