The Security Operations Center (SOC) as its name suggests, is responsible for operationalizing security; meaning that the SOC team’s main goal is not to devise a cyber security strategy, but to make sure the security of the organization’s assets and data is effectively managed and stored.

SOCs are often equipped with firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, breach detection capabilities, and most importantly, a security information and event management (SIEM) system.

The SIEM system takes log data from hundreds of suppliers’ products and tries to make sense of them in order to produce meaningful alerts. While a SIEM collects from a lot of sources, it doesn’t have an inherent response component, so today’s SIEMs function more as a fire alarm that’s not connected to the sprinklers.

The SOC Challenges

A report by the Ponemon Institute, which surveyed 554 IT and cyber security practitioners working in organizations that have an SOC noted 58% of the respondents rated their SOC’s effectiveness low due to the lack of insight into network traffic, lack of timely remediation, lack of skilled personnel, and data limits.

To add, the difficulty in threat hunting is endless, adding the already-existing workplace stress—there are simply too many indicators of compromise to track and too much internal traffic to compare against the indicators.

How to Overcome the SOC Challenges in 2020

Optimizing SOC performance with security orchestration and automation response (SOAR) can relieve SOC analysts of routine tasks, freeing them up to focus on real incident response and cyber defense strategies.

LogZilla’s Network Event Orchestration platform (LZ NEO) resolves the top challenges SOCs face, enabling any SIEM solution to work faster and better, minimizing data challenges. Further, LZ NEO improves the performance of any SOAR technology providing enriched automation to allow better response time and quicker triage of cases—this ultimately translates to lower dwell time of an attack and reduces the risk of a data breach.

A reliable, round-the-clock, process-driven-SOC allows more robust cyber risk management control to organizations, allowing them to focus on governance and compliance, align their policies to their core businesses, and deliver a positive customer experience.

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