There is a serious problem that plagues the cyber security industry today. Many CISOs and CIOs would love to hire an experienced team to provide constant supervision of their endpoints, SaaS platforms and the networks they are responsible for, but they are often not provided the budget needed for this level of service.
The threat landscape is growing rapidly as the complexity of our systems, networks and applications increases. And yet, security teams are rarely given the necessary capital investment to protect their corporate environment and prevent catastrophe. Why? Because it is difficult to prove a negative. How do you present a counterfactual scenario that demonstrates the implications from improper control or an open port that allowed bad actors to infiltrate and take servers hostage via ransomware?
While you may never be able to substantiate such an assertion fully, a Security Operations Center as a Service (SOCaaS) platform would be a fantastic (and cost-effective) place to start. If you ever wonder “where are the security gaps that I don’t know about,” or “what am I doing right,” or even “has my network already been compromised,” then it might be worth exploring a SOCaaS solution.
A SOCaaS platform can provide you with valuable insight that you may not otherwise have available. This service can often act as the “canary in the coal mine,” letting you know when bad actors are attempting to find vulnerabilities they can then exploit, when they’ve been prevented from doing so, or, in the worst-case scenario, when they’ve been successful at breaching your network. Gaining greater visibility and knowledge of when an attack is unsuccessful is critically important, as it justifies solid security tools, practices, and procedures.
Another reason SOCaaS is so appealing is that it offers the benefits of a Security Operations Center (or SOC) without having to pay for a full-time security team. Enterprises spend an average of $3 million on their in-house SOC per year , as building your own SOC generally means having to find capable technical talent and purchasing expensive hardware on top of the ongoing maintenance, licensing, and other ownership costs of said hardware. Outsourcing SOC can typically cost a fraction of that and allows you to outsource all the overhead and associated liabilities.
Additionally, an external SOC provider supplies you with a team of experts who have hands-on experience detecting and rectifying security incidents, whereas internal IT teams may not have the expertise needed to address specific breaches. It’s also beneficial to have a team outside of your organization to make sure your “house is in order” – and a good SOCaaS platform will do that for you. Over time, a SOCaaS will improve protection, detection and response capabilities through continuous assessment and reporting, including guidance on security strategies and policies.
An often-overlooked advantage of implementing a managed SOC is that it can help you reach your compliance needs and cover several areas of the CIS 18 controls or other frameworks that you adhere to. This is especially true of SOCaaS/MSSPs that provide detection and response capabilities in addition to the usual services that a typical SOC offers. This can include automatically stopping file encryption on servers or user’s workstations, blocking IPs that attempt to brute force their way into your services or devices, actively stopping threats coming from the web or via email, and much more. These automated features are known in the industry as SOAR (Security Orchestration Automation and Response). Even if your SOCaaS doesn’t deliver these types of features, you will still benefit from having forensic investigation capabilities, log management, storage retention, and the ability to perform threat correlation – all things that any CISO should find beneficial.[HB1]
But any tool, no matter how useful, doesn’t make sense when its cost exceeds the budget of the entire project. A SOC provides value for an organization, regardless of size or technical complexity, but outsourcing the functions to a SOCaaS provider makes sense financially for most companies. These businesses obtain an essential asset in keeping their networks safe from cybercriminals by using best-in-class analysis while improving the performance and scalability of their security operations. By taking a proactive approach to security, you can sleep easier at night knowing you are one step ahead of would-be attackers.
5Q offers Centry Managed Security, our own SOCaaS platform to keep your IT and OT networks secure. Our team of experts at 5Q Cyber have the skills, knowledge, and tools to provide a top-notch SOCaas platform that can save commercial real estate organizations time and money by monitoring and responding to cyber incidents. If you’d like to learn how Centry can help your CRE organization, contact us to schedule a consultation at www.5qcloud.com/contact-us