Security monitoring is an integral process in cybersecurity. Security monitoring provides any organization with the ability to detect and analyze events from the enterprise network, applications, endpoints, and user activities. Typically, security operations and continuous monitoring (SOC) has three elements: people, process, and technology.
Technology helps drive the monitoring of assets, such as networks, applications, endpoints, servers, web applications, and generates alerts by automatic correlation and analysis:
The people component in SOC focuses on validating these alerts manually and categorizing them.
The process component is all about analyzing the alerts/logs and either identifies a threat and provides detailed information to the remediation team or marks it as false positive:
SOC also has to align its purpose with the business goals and vision of the organization. SOC needs to build its monitoring strategy to fulfill the business needs. SOC in general is a 24/7 operation, and this is by design so that SOC analysts, proper processes, and the detection technologies can help to reduce the gap between time to detection versus when the attack happened by processing data from internal corporate sources and correlating them with the known threat information from a wide range of external sources. With enriched and actionable threat intelligence, advanced analytics capabilities, data contextualization, and the right skills in place, an SOC can also act proactively to deter and stop attacks. An SOC always relies on intelligence, such as malware data, indicators of compromise and attack information, and threat and vulnerability reports by security vendors and application vendors. Modern SOCs need to embrace security automation and machine learning to reach the highest level of maturity. Other than the core technology of SIEM, threat-intelligence feeds, and various data feeds, SOC can leverage technologies such as intrusion-detection tools, antivirus integrations, DLP feeds, workflows, and reporting tools. SOC can be achieved in three different ways: captive SOC or self-managed SOC, co-managed SOC, and fully managed SOC by a third party.