6 Ways Businesses Optimize IT Spend by Outsourcing SOC-as-a-Service

Striking a balance between efficacy and budget can be one of the biggest challenges for any IT cybersecurity team. Purchasing all or a portion of the recommended technologies would greatly exceed the total IT budget of most organizations. Adding skilled InfoSec staff can also strain the budget, as these workers are highly specialized and difficult to find. These challenges leave organizations under-equipped in the technologies, staff, and processes needed to fight cyber threats. However, having a SOC in place is still crucial.

Here Are 6 Ways Businesses Can Save Money by Outsourcing Their Security Operations Center:

Key Factors For Threat Detection and Response

Before you adopt SOC-as-a-Service, you need to understand what makes for a successful Security Operations Center. There are four main elements that go into effective threat detection and response:

High Accuracy - Identifying genuine threats is the main goal of detection and response. False positives pull time and energy away from true threats. In order to achieve the highest accuracy, modern SOC-as-a-Service solutions leverage human-assisted machine learning.
Comprehensive Visibility - Most organizations have multiple IT environments such as on-premise data centers, public cloud platforms, managed hosting, Security-as-a-Service offerings, Software-as-a-Service applications, and private cloud platforms. Each can be attacked.
Tailored Services - Since every organization is unique, its composition of IT resources, compliance, and cyber threats vary. Effective threat response solutions are tailored to every customer.
Scalability - The number of system logs and security logs will fluctuate daily, but over time will increase. This means that the platform supporting the threat detection must scale. In addition, the cost should remain predictable.

As businesses continue to become digitally independent, their attack surface expands. Typically in a cyber compromise, there are indicators of compromise (IoC); however, the indicators are buried in a pile of system alerts and logs. Because the indicators are buried deep in an avalanche, experts may not have the time to understand them and avoid damage. With growing cyber threats, Increased security alerts and system logs are causing a high demand for experts to achieve threat detection. Because many organizations lack InfoSec talent and the proper amount of employees needed to detect and respond to threats, damages have been more likely to occur.

Outsourcing Your SOC-as-a-Service

When assessing SOC-as-a-Service options, most businesses want an affordable and effective solution. Here are six ways an outsourced SOC delivers on both:

Attribute	iCorps SOC	DIY SOC
Cost	Economical and predictable	Cost-prohibitive for mid-sized and small businesses; unpredictable
Staffing	Fully managed	Organization is responsible for recruitment and training
Deployment	Turnkey	Months to years for full deployment
Customization	High with customization created by experts	High within feature set of solution; based on staff's time and expertise
Resiliency	Cloud-based design to ensure reliability	Organization must accommodated all factors
Technology Revolution	New features and upgrades once testing and implementation is complete	Dependent on the organization's budget, time, and planning

DIY SOCs face a number of challenges. Staffing should include a SOC manager, security engineers, and security analysts. Around-the-clock monitoring is crucial to minimize the time that intruders can invade a system, capture credentials, and start building backdoors. By outsourcing your SOC, you also have a partner that can recommend and find solutions for vulnerability scanning and external threat intelligence, both of which can provide resilience to emerging attack types. If you want to learn more about SOC-as-a-Service or schedule a free IT consultation contact us at iCorps.