Executive Summary
Security operations grows more difficult on an annual basis as cyber-adversaries collaborate and improve their attacks to circumvent security controls and analytics systems.
Meanwhile, the attack surface keeps expanding as CIOs move workloads to public clouds while business managers embrace SaaS applications and new types of devices for digital transformation.
Somehow, the security operations center (SOC) team is responsible for monitoring all these systems and network connections to prevent, detect, investigate and respond to security incidents.
Unfortunately, many organizations simply can’t keep up with the growing scale and scope of security operations, increasing cyber-risk and the potential for a devastating cyber-attack or data breach.
Why have things gotten so difficult and what can be done to address this situation? This report concludes:
• Security operations is fraught with many challenges.
Many security operations centers were built using disconnected point tools and manual processes.
This design may have worked in the past, but it is no match for today’s environment, which requires speed and efficiency. As a result, security teams are buried by security alerts and spend much of their time dealing with one emergency or another.
• Organizations are modernizing their SOCs. The term “SOC modernization” has gained popularity within the cybersecurity professional community.
SOC modernization includes things like technology integration, process automation, advanced analytics, and threat intelligence contextualization and enrichment within all other security operations technologies.
The goal? Create an interoperable security operations and analytics platform architecture (SOAPA) that can help the SOC team bolster security efficacy and operational efficiency.
• SIEM systems should be integrated with NDR. SIEMs anchor their analytics to event and log data while NDR monitors network flows, packets, and metadata.
Many organizations use both systems independently when they really have a common purpose—timely and accurate threat detection and incident response.
By combining these two systems, organizations can benefit from higher fidelity, detailed, and actionable alerts.
This can lead to improvements in meantime-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-respond (MTTR) to threats.
