What Is SOC Modernization

The increasing number of cybersecurity threats means that it's constantly more challenging to monitoring and prevent these threats. These rising attacks indicate that your organization - indeed, your intellectual property - is constantly at risk.

Modernizing your SOC is now mandatory: so you can ensure you're ready and futureproofed for detecting all sorts of malicious attacks. This article explains:

• Why modernizing SOCs is important.

• How to do it right.

• What challenges does it involve?

The landscape for SOCs

The average cost of cybercrime globally was $4.45 million last year. These attacks dominated in 2023, breaching even the security of the U.S. State Department. Here's the average breach cost of a few industries :

• The healthcare sector faced an average breach cost of $11 million.

• The financial sector experienced an average breach cost of $6 million.

• Pharmaceuticals came in third place, with an average breach cost of $4.82 million.

You can expect a massive rise in these numbers and more advancements in attack technologies in the coming years. That's why every organization needs modernized SOCs - to build resilience.

Security operation centers (SOCs) protect organizations' data by detecting and mitigating harmful threats. And here's how SOC managers manage these security operations centers:

1. They collect data and review alerts to identify risk events and potential incidents.

2. After identifying and reviewing, they design and implement strategies to recover from incidents.

(See how Splunk is powering the SOC of the future.)

Traditional SOCs: Understanding risks & gaps

Before 1995, SOCs were only made available to military and government organizations. Their main focus was to detect incidents - so they could manually recover them.

In contrast, organizations and banks relied on a reactive approach to managing network devices and manually monitoring performance.

General SecOps challenges

In short, traditional SOCs had many loopholes - and those loopholes now riddle SOCs and SecOps globally. Today, nearly 96% of organizations face at least one of these security operations challenges with their staff and systems:

• Spotting threats quickly and taking action to minimize damage and keep your systems safe.

• Ensuring comprehensive security measures are in place to protect all aspects.

• Cutting through the noise of security alert and pinpointing the ones requiring immediate attention.

• Adhering to evolving data security regulations and industry best practices.

SecOps workflow challenges

Going beyond basic security operations challenges, there are also many workflow challenges that CISOs and security teams face:

• Continuously monitoring the network to identify and address various types of vulnerabilities.

• Using disparate security tools ("tool sprawl") makes understanding the overall security posture difficult and contributes to cross-functional inefficiencies.

• Security tools and systems don't integrate easily, wasting time and effort.

• Reliance on manual processes for security tasks slows down the ability to identify and respond to threats.

(Learn about security automation.)

With all this, we can say that most organizations today do not have SOCs that can keep up with today's pace. So, modernizing the SOC must become a priority.

Importance of SOC modernization

SOC modernization helps organizations stay ahead of breaches and attackers' tactics. Modernized SOCs are prepared for the future because they can:

• Detect threats seamlessly.

• Improve and enhance collaboration.

• Manage cybersecurity risks effectively.

Detect threats

Time is important, especially when it comes to identifying threats. Earlier threat detection reduces the time to exploit vulnerabilities. Continuous monitoring as part of SOC modernization makes it possible to identify threats before they occur.

(Related reading: the TDIR lifecycle: threat detection, investigation & response.)

Improve collaboration

Team collaboration is the backbone of any secure system. SOC modernization empowers teams by improving their communication and problem-solving skills.

Unlike traditional SOC, various security teams collaborate and share information faster. With improved collaboration, teams can reduce the response time.

Handle sophisticated threats

Cybersecurity attacks become more sophisticated every day. To stay ahead, it's important to evolve attack detection tools. To deal with the complexity of attacks, you need tools that identify and prevent them. Modernizing SOCs makes this possible.

Reduce response time

SOC modernization reduces the detection and mitigation period. With automation tools, you can reduce response time. Effective solutions such as AI and ML are examples of modernized SOCs.

(Power your SOC with full visibility and security monitoring from Splunk.)

How to modernize your SOC

Cybersecurity threats are never stopping. For this reason, modernizing your SOC is a must - but where do you begin? Organizations can use these best practices to improve their SecOps workflows and threat detection capabilities.

At Splunk, we are powering the SOC of the future with four areas of maturity, all accelerated by Splunk AI:

1. Enable foundational visibility so you can see across environments.

2. Get guided insights thanks to AI and ML-powered detections that provide the context you need exactly when you need it.

3. Get ahead of issues with proactive response that uses automation to accelerate incident investigations and response.

4. Collaborate seamlessly with unified workflows and a single data platform.

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