7 Steps to Building a Security Operations Center

Cyber-attack volume and the cost of cybercrime continue to grow. Market uncertainty constrains budgets, including those for cybersecurity. Threats continue to evolve and step up their attack pace. 

Your business pursues growth and innovation goals. It embraces more technology, moves more to the cloud, and hires more people working remotely. Your critical infrastructure expands, access points multiply, and you realize you must develop a more formalized security practice.

Your executive team is calling for assurances of resilience in the face of all this uncertainty. The business can’t afford an attack that might tarnish its reputation, cause financial damage, or halt the momentum for new product launches and entering three new markets this year. 

You assess your current security conditions:

• Your organization is growing more attractive to cyber threats. Attack volume is increasing, along with sophistication. But data silos limit visibility, making it harder to be sure your team detects all threats.
• New products and markets come with new compliance regulations and mandates. It’s imperative to demonstrate due diligence to achieve and maintain compliance.
• You realize you need tailored security practices that meet the specific needs of your business context, as well as stronger security requirements.

After considering what’s going on in the world externally, as well as within your business, you conclude that your organization needs a security operations center (SOC). It’s imperative to improve threat detection and decrease the likelihood of security breaches. 

What Is a Security Operations Center?

A security operations center is a physical or virtual facility designed to protect an organization from cybersecurity threats 24/7. The goal is relentless vigilance over a company’s IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, endpoints, databases, applications, and cloud environments. The outcome to achieve is to protect the company's information assets from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, alteration, or destruction.

 The SOC team sets rules and continually monitors networks, servers, devices, operating systems, applications, and databases for signs of security anomalies and exceptions or new vulnerabilities. It collects threat data from firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, endpoint detection and response (EDR) and security information and event management (SIEM) systems. 

When a system detects suspicious activity or a breach, it triggers an alert to the SOC team, which investigates and responds to them as they occur. 

How to Build a SOC in 7 Steps

Here are 7 practical steps to building a SOC for your business:

Step 1: Develop Your Strategy 

The first step is to clarify your business objectives for building the SOC. Part of this exercise involves determining which systems and data are most critical to sustaining the company’s operations. Simply creating a SOC to improve your security posture without factoring in the overarching business goals could result in misalignment and even cause the SOC to miss a key threat that culminates in a devastating cyber incident. 

The next step is to assess your company’s existing SOC capabilities in terms of people, processes, and technology. If you’re starting from scratch, limit your SOC’s initial scope to core functions (i.e., monitoring, detection, response, and recovery). Delay more advanced functions, such as vulnerability management, until your core functions have matured sufficiently.

Step 2: Design the Solution 

When designing your solution, start by selecting a few business-critical use cases and define your initial SOC solution based on these, bearing in mind that it will need to scale to meet additional future needs. Keeping your initial solution’s design conservatively scoped in the early stages will reduce the time it takes you to implement it and see results.

Follow these steps to complete the design process:

• Define the functional requirements: These should include identifying your sources of log and event data to monitor, your sources of threat intelligence, and determine performance requirements, for example, response times.
• Choose your SOC model: Your strategy and functional requirements determine your SOC model. Here, you’ll need to make decisions about operating hours and shifts and which roles to fill internally versus outsourcing. 
• Design your technical architecture: This includes specifying the composition and configuration of your solution’s components, including the SIEM platform. You’ll also need to clarify which business and information systems to integrate with your SIEM platform. Other actions include defining workflows for events and incidents, so they align with the processes your organization already has in place. Finally, you’ll need to decide to what extent to embed automation into your solution to gain optimum visibility of the threat landscape and thwart attacks as early in the attack lifecycle as possible. 

Step 3: Develop Processes, Procedures, and Training

If you’re building a partially outsourced solution, it’s vital to work with your managed security services provider (MSSP) to ensure mutual agreement for processes, procedures, and training. 

Step 4: Prepare Your Environment

Before you deploy your SOC, check that all components are fit-for-purpose and guarantee a secure environment. This should include protecting your SOC staff’s devices, and that robust access management and authentication mechanisms are in place.

Step 5: Implement Your Solution 

Follow these steps for your initial SOC deployment:

• Bring up the log management infrastructure. 
• Onboard the minimum collection of critical data sources. 
• Activate security analytics and security automation and orchestration capabilities. 
• Start deploying a few use cases that focus on end-to-end threat detection and response.
• Integrate threat intelligence feeds and other intelligence sources as automated inputs to enhance detection accuracy. 

Step 6: Deploy End-to-End Use Cases

Now that you’ve deployed your SOC’s core capabilities, you can start implementing use cases across analytics, security automation, and orchestration tiers. This might include detecting compromised credentials or successful spear phishing campaigns. 

Step 7: Maintain and Enhance Your Solution 

Once your SOC is in production, it will need ongoing maintenance, such as updates to configuration settings and adjustments to improve detection accuracy. In time, you can consider adding other systems, either as inputs or outputs to advance your security maturity.

In Conclusion

There are many moving parts to building a Security Operations Center but thinking of them in steps makes the challenge achievable.