You may have heard the term ‘Security Operations Centre’ or ‘SOC’ before, but do you know what that is and how it can benefit your business?
A SOC can monitor all of your endpoints and network, identify potential and real incidents, and efficiently handle them. But only if you set it up the right way and maintain it correctly. There are also some negatives to running your own SOC rather than outsourcing to an expert team, like our cyber security team here at The Missing Link, for example.
What are the challenges of running your own SOC?
It’s important to ensure that if you are looking to build your own SOC, you must put the correct measures in place and have access to the right tools.
If you don’t have the right people, it just won’t work! There are very specific tasks that need to be undertaken, meaning people with the right skillsets and training can be hard to find. And once you find these unicorns, you need to ensure they stay up to date with the latest training so that they can continue to be effective.
Beyond people, defence is the next key factor – you should ensure teams are split out into detection and prevention to ensure you’re getting the right mix. And of course, budget is a very important aspect. Some large businesses can, and do, run their own SOCs, but the cost of doing so and then properly maintaining it is prohibitive to many smaller businesses.
What’s the alternative to having an in-house SOC?
If you don’t have the budget or resources to run your own SOC, there are alternatives, such as using a commercial SOC like ours. Here at The Missing Link, we have a state-of-the-art security operations centre in our Sydney office. We have invested heavily in the latest equipment and cutting-edge software, which we combine with one of the most certified security teams in Australia.
This has resulted in an incredible, secure facility where business information systems (web sites, applications, data, databases, data centres and servers, networks, desktops and other endpoints) are monitored, assessed, and defended.
Businesses will be able to leverage our SOC’s security experts to help with strategic planning for best practice multi-cloud security, tactical day-to-day security monitoring, and threat analysis to deter, detect and respond to potential threats around the clock.
What is the importance of a SOC?
The security posture of a business is critical to its stability and viability. Unfortunately, a single email received or a link inadvertently opened might be the incident that exposes your business to a breach.
A total of 1,057 incidents were reported in Australia under the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) scheme in 2020, an increase of 73% from 2019. With no industry immune from the risk, global companies like Facebook and SITA have recently felt the force of a data breach, resulting in data of over 533 million Facebook users and millions of passenger data being leaked, respectively. A vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange also led to a recent warning with over 7000 Australian servers at risk of a breach.
Our SOC has provided businesses with the breach-visibility and strategic planning they need for responding to potential threats with round-the-clock monitoring. If monitoring your business is important to you, we can help. Contact us today and start a conversation.
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