Balancing the complex facets of an organization’s security strategy requires understanding what parts make up the big picture, what each tool and practice does for security, and how effective the security measures in place really are. Many Security Operations Center (SOC) operations are tedious and time-consuming, drawing resources for teams to complete repetitive tasks.

It can be difficult for security teams to handle the volume of work given to them and carry out their function in the organization, especially if their security solutions and policies are lacking. Automating some of those repetitive and time-consuming jobs can help to ensure that security teams are not overwhelmed with more work than they can reasonably manage.

Important Functions of SOC Operations

In order to achieve maximum success and effectiveness, SOC operations fulfill many functions within an organization through a combination of human effort and technological solutions. There is a wide range of essential cybersecurity processes that a SOC can handle, including:

• Monitoring: Watching the organization’s networks in an effort to catch signs of malicious or aberrant activity, enabling teams to address potential threats in real-time, decreasing key SOC metrics like Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR).
• Threat Detection: Detecting and identifying threats to the network by examining network activity and metrics corroborating security events from multiple sources to detect suspicious behavioral patterns.
• Incident Response: Carrying out previously outlined procedures for the containment, investigation, and remediation of cybersecurity incidents.
• Threat Hunting: Proactively looking to find signs indicating potentially malicious actions within the network, rather than simply waiting for incidents to occur.
• Logging and Reporting: Maintaining detailed logs of network activity for transparency in reporting, audits, and compliance.
• Improving Security Operations: Using the information obtained through incident detection and response to continually evaluate SOC processes and practices and improve threat-fighting capability.

SOC Capacity and Expected Work

Two of the important SOC metrics that can help organizations evaluate their security processes for efficacy and efficiency are SOC Capacity and Expected Work. SOC Capacity is a measure of the total available time that the SOC team has to address security alerts in a month. This metric should exceed the average monthly workload by enough of a margin to ensure the team can manage surges in security alerts.

Expected Work refers to the total amount of work expected in alert management in a given month. The interconnected nature of SOC Capacity and Expected Work means that monitoring and managing these metrics is an essential part of maintaining security in any organization. If Expected Work exceeds SOC Capacity by too much, it can lead to alert fatigue and an overwhelming volume of tasks within the security team. Organizations must ensure that their SOC Capacity is more than their Expected Work in order to empower teams to handle the amount of work on their plates each month.

As discussed above, some SOC processes tend to be time-intensive and tedious, inflating the workload for security teams and leaving them with too many tasks to juggle. Offsetting the ratio of Expected Work to SOC Capacity can cause important functions to fall to the wayside as teams are overwhelmed and begin to burn out.

Automation of SOC Operations

Threat trends and the digital landscape only become more complex over time, making it both more important and more difficult for organizations to maintain security. The volume and complexity of alerts, the increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats, and the growing attack surface have all meant that security teams often have a hard time covering all of their bases.

This is where automation can be of great help. While there are many aspects of security that cannot yet be reliably automated, there are other areas where automation can significantly cut down on the amount of time and effort that human security teams have to invest in repetitive, tedious tasks. It makes for a lower volume of Expected Work, giving teams the opportunity to carry out important work that cannot be automated.

By automating tasks and processes like the collection of large volumes of data, the analysis of that data to identify potential threats, and the investigation of incidents, organizations can optimize the workflow of their security operations. These operations can be carried out faster and with far less staff effort, helping to improve threat investigation and remediation times. With less staff attention focused on time-consuming work, organizations can improve their security operations and protect against more threats.

Conclusion

Alongside metrics like Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and False Negative Rates, an organization’s SOC Capacity and Expected Work can provide significant insight into the effectiveness of the security measures in place. A lower SOC Capacity can indicate that the organization lacks sufficient staffing and resources to carry out essential security tasks.

Security decisions informed and driven by real metrics can more effectively address the risks that are present in the organization’s network. In order to develop a security strategy with successful vulnerability management and risk-aware security operations, monitoring these key metrics is a crucial step. Implementing automation in appropriate resource-intensive areas can be an effective response to ameliorate a heavy workload if your organization’s SOC Capacity is much lower than Expected Work.

About the author:
PJ Bradley is a writer on a wide variety of topics, passionate about learning and helping people above all else. Holding a bachelor’s degree from Oakland University, PJ enjoys using a lifelong desire to understand how things work to write about subjects that inspire interest. Most of PJ’s free time is spent reading and writing.