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SOC Readiness Best Practices – The Fundamentals

Ideally, an organization’s Security Operations Center (SOC) is battle-tested and ready for anything. However, in working with some of the biggest SOCs in the world, we’ve seen that even Fortune 50 companies routinely miss 50% of the malicious tactics they are tested against. The root cause is that many organizations are not practicing SOC readiness best practices, in a proactive and comprehensive way, against the security threats they actually need to stop.

Are you protected against the endless hacks? By following SOC readiness best practices, you can secure your organization and understand how your SOC is actually performing against the threats you face every day.

Watch the video below to learn how you can use SOC assessment tools to know that your people, processes, and technology are prepared to stop a cyberattack.

Learn More:

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Video Transcript

Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:39 SOC Readiness
1:13 SOC Readiness: Root Cause
1:32 SOC Readiness: SightGain Readiness Approach
2:11 Cybersecurity Readiness Approach
2:39 SightGain Readiness Approach

Cybersecurity leaders, we know cybersecurity is a dynamic market and your SOC has to keep pace. So new innovations and methods are being rolled out all the time. But how do you know if they are right for you? How do you know if you’re making the most of your investment that you’ve already made in your SOC? You need a way to understand how your SOC is performing against the security threats that you face every day.

0:39 SOC Readiness

People typically think a SOC gets it right most of the time. I mean, they’re reporting metrics that say they’re stopping millions of malicious actions, emails, and viruses. But that’s just what they’re catching. In order to take advantage of the best practices in the market today, your SOC has to test against malicious activity on a routine basis to know that you’re stopping what you should be stopping.

However, we’ve seen even fortune 50 companies are routinely missing over 50 percent of the malicious tactics that they’re tested against. This means that in a day-to-day environment, they may be stopping a lot of bad things, but they’re certainly not stopping all of the bad things. We’ve seen and worked in some of the biggest SOCs in the world. And it’s safe to say that they’re missing things on a routine basis.

1:13 SOC Readiness: Root Cause

So in this year of endless hacks, why are we still doing so poorly? We think the root cause is that many of these organizations are not testing in a proactive and comprehensive way. Because unless you’re testing against the security threats you’re supposed to stop and practicing against those techniques to make sure that your system is working, you’re just not going to stop them. So how do you achieve the industry-best practice for your SOC?

1:32 SOC Readiness: SightGain Readiness Approach

Our customers take a readiness approach that starts from the ground up by focusing on the security threats first. By focusing on threats, we can build tests that can be run and look at your technology, your process, and your people to see how they’re responding. Are they preventing and detecting and alerting to these threats as they’re crossing your system in a safe way? Or are they just missing it and the system is not catching up of what the threats are doing?

So using this approach, you can inform not only the telemetry and make decisions about how to tune your current systems, but make really informed decisions about what you should do about investments and future methodologies.

2:11 Cybersecurity Readiness Approach

Likewise, using this approach, you get the information you need for your organization to adopt industry best practices, ensure that you make the most of what you have, and then get what you need, not just the shiny new thing.

So new methods can be tested and improved through routine testing and practice as well as better decisions and information to the executives and the board.

2:39 SightGain Readiness Approach

This approach takes advantage of recent innovations in the breach and attack market. By combining telemetry about your technology performance with information about your personnel performance, you can understand your overall system performance, rapidly increase your maturity, and soon be the market leader that everyone else wants to turn to.

So in review, in order to adopt industry best practices, you have to know how well you’re performing. We recommend the cybersecurity readiness approach that starts with the threat, tests the performance of your security system, across people, process, and technology against those security threats, and then make adjustments and investments based on the results.

This process leads to continuous improvement based on hard data.

Click the link below to find out about how SightGain can help improve the performance of your SOC and subscribe to our YouTube channel to keep pace with all of the innovations that SightGain is rolling out.