What cybersecurity challenges do SOCs face in the coming months?
A security operations center (SOC) is the centralized security team that deploys the tools needed to continuously monitor and improve an organization's security approach while also preventing, detecting, analyzing and responding to security alerts. You could say the SOC acts as the central command of an organization's security, bringing together its entire IT infrastructure, including its networks, devices and company data, both inside the corporate perimeter and outside.
In recent years, SOCs have played a critical role as companies face more security risks in the volume and sophistication of cyberthreats, which are now capable of getting around the most advanced automated security controls. The complexity of the infrastructure to be protected as the attack surface is expanding exponentially, the volume of security alerts to manage, and a shortage of qualified professionals are factors that organizations have to contend with. This has a negative impact on security and Gartner has predicted that by 2025 cybercriminals will have gained the capacity to harm critical infrastructures to the point of endangering human lives.
This means SOCs must stay ahead of sophisticated and unknown threats. Their job is to detect and correlate anomalous behavior that clearly identifies a security incident and respond as soon as possible. However, not all security tools and solutions provide enough support. Despite being designed to detect and alert, a mere avalanche of alerts means that professionals still have to determine whether they are real or not. This leads to alert fatigue, which apart from having an operational cost, can result in missed threats or diagnostic errors. There is also a lack of qualified talent and training in cybersecurity.
To meet these challenges, it is essential for SOCs to have cybersecurity tools that enable them to be as efficient as possible. Although traditional security solutions are necessary, they are insufficient on their own. First, because alerts are based on known threats, so they may not take into account suspicious processes that are not covered in their logs and therefore fail to detect unknown threats. And secondly, they adopt a reactive approach with respect to those logs and do not perform independent searches for other potential attack indicators that would enable them to anticipate an incident.
This is why SOCs must complement their cybersecurity solutions with advanced tools based on a proactive approach, where there is a constant and automated search for both known and unknown threats based on threat hunting, proactive detection, and response in the early stages of the attack.
In the current context, the WatchGuard for SOCs value proposition is based on a combination of advanced security solutions and proactive managed services to effectively hunt, detect and respond to any threats that have evaded other security protection on computers, servers, Cloud environments or mobile devices. Alert fatigue, the growth of the attack-exposed surface, complexity of the threat landscape and the challenges of talent shortages can be addressed as a result and company security operations are optimized.
