Now you can! But should you do it?
As anticipated here and here, our new paper about how to plan, design, operate and evolve a Security Operations Center is out!
This is a big doc with guidance for organizations with the intent of building their SOC (or for those that have one and want to make it better :-)). One of the things we gave special attention to was the first question to be answered: do you need a SOC? It’s not as simple as it sounds, as the commitment of resources and pre-requisites, as the paper describes in detail, are quite big. There are alternatives (namely service providers) out there that should really be considered before embarking in that journey.
Also, even if you are certain you want (and need) to do it, you most certainly won’t do it alone. One of our main findings in this paper is that most SOCs are in fact hybrid SOCs, with service providers filling competency gaps and providing resources that are usually not cost effective to have in house unless you are a very particular (and rare) type of organization.
Here are a few interesting pieces from the paper:
“Although most existing security operations centers (SOCs) are modeled as alert pipelines, a good SOC includes threat intelligence (TI) consumption and generation practices tied closely to incident response (IR) and hunting activities.”
“Modern SOCs should move beyond SIEM and include additional technologies (such as NFT, EDR, TIP, UEBA, and SIRP) to improve visibility, threat detection and IR capabilities.”
“Any organization establishing a SOC should have a plan for staff retention from the outset. Security skills are rare, and attrition from the intense operational work that is natural for a SOC make hiring and retention key issues for keeping a SOC functional.”
“There is no such thing as a list of “tools a SOC must have.” Many SOCs make do with serious tool limitations by compensating the deficiencies with process, additional people, alternative technologies (think SharePoint instead of SOAR tools) or scripts. However, the chances of success of a SOC greatly improve when tools providing visibility, analysis, and action and management are present. Most SOCs (at a basic maturity level) operate with, at minimum, a SIEM for analysis and VA tools for visibility. As the maturity of the SOC increases, the need for additional tools becomes stronger. A basic SOC, for example, can simply detect some malicious activity on the SIEM and send an email to the CSIRT or even to the help desk for action. That might be enough for organizations that just remove infected computers from the network and reimage them. But if the intent is to learn about the real extent of an incident (and whether other computers and assets have been compromised) and extract data to be used to improve preventive and detective controls, additional visibility (e.g., EDR and NFT) and management (e.g., workflow and case management) tools will be necessary.”
The paper is available for Garter GTP clients. However, I’d like to point out that Anton recently did a webinar based on this same research, which is available for free on Gartner’s website. Have fun watching it and don’t forget to provide us feedback
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