Why should businesses outsource their Security Operations Centre?

The Security Operations Centre (SOC) is a key component of any cybersecurity strategy to help organisations detect threats early and mitigate risk. Typically, the SOC is situated to monitor all sources of network traffic and activities to detect threats or anomalies.

In order for a SOC to best fulfil its purpose, it requires a constant influx of data from various sources. This includes all the data that flows through the network and databases in the form of:

• Network and DNS logs
• Firewall and intrusion detection/prevention logs
• Email and web logs
• Database activity logs
• Event logs
• And many more

IT teams can be understaffed and often, a business won’t have an extensive team with all areas of expertise covered. With thousands of alerts being delivered to the SOC every day, how can an IT team take on this additional work? Enter outsourcing. Outsourcing your SOC frees your staff to pursue other business operations and growth tasks, while still preserving the necessary level of attention to detail for the multiple alerts being flagged across various security monitoring tooling. A SOC without enough time or resources becomes vulnerable. When you outsource, the managed security services provider is thinking about the smaller details that you might overlook due to a lack of time or in-house expertise. This alleviates the risk that your SOC becomes a bottleneck for the company’s attack prevention and overall security posture.

Businesses have to defend their borders through the use of sophisticated data and cyber security measures. Security is quickly becoming an integral part of business operations, for both technical and strategic decisions. But with security being a highly modified and dynamic area, businesses should consider outsourcing their security operations to expert professionals with specific knowledge, experience, qualifications such as CREST and CHECK accreditations, and expertise.

Security should no longer be a role solely handled by the IT department as it is rapidly becoming a key business function. Outsourcing security operations will give the company the opportunity to focus on its core business operations, as well as give them the flexibility to hire employees with other skillsets. It also gives companies the opportunity to save money from hiring external contractors, as companies are able to hire specialists and consultants to help them with specific tasks and projects at a lower cost than hiring a full-time staff member.

Here are some of the benefits of outsourcing security operations:

• If you’re just starting out and don’t have the expertise in-house, outsourcing will give you the flexibility to build your resources without constraints
• If your company changes direction, you can more easily change what you need to monitor without adding additional workload to your already stretched in-house team
• Reducing costs. You’ll need to hire staff with extensive cyber security experience, which comes at a high price

Outsourcing security operations makes this possible. SOCs come with many technical requirements that require a business to invest significant time and resources. One of the most important considerations is recruitment. SOC managers need to be trained, and they need to be experienced in cyber security. They also need to be sensitive to privacy concerns.

Security operations is a tough job, and usually requires an immense amount of cyber security expertise to do well. This knowledge doesn’t come cheap. If companies are attacked by cyber criminals, it can be a highly dangerous and costly event, either from a recovery perspective or from the loss of reputation and the impact this could have on the bottom line profits and revenue. Outsourcing security operations will give companies the opportunity to focus on their core business operations, as well as give them the flexibility to hire employees with other skillsets, at a total lower cost of ownership when compared with trying to recruit the level of in-house expertise and tooling needed to match an outsourced service.

For more information about why the business case for outsourcing your SOC has never been stronger, and to get insight into how you can get round the clock threat detection and response, access to highly skilled security professionals, make effective use of your cyber security budget and neutralise potential attacks in less than 6 minutes, download the ebook.