Whether you run a 9-5 business or operate 24 hours a day, your exposure to hackers prevails; hackers do not take time off. That’s why decision-makers need to ensure their company is secure 24/7, 365 days a year. Most small to mid-sized companies can neither afford nor have the skill set to run their own Security Operations Center (SOC), so they need to look elsewhere for solutions to secure their organization’s infrastructure. Here, we have highlighted some of the business challenges a SOC as a service solves.
Utilization and Staffing
Typically there are big spikes and valleys of work coming through a security center 24/7, so there is a need for staffing around the clock to ensure you have the right visibility into your environment. Often businesses may have one person dedicated to securing their organization but this isn’t enough. Attacks come from all angles, and more concerningly — from all time-zones. A threat that presents outside 9-5 hours requires a team of specialists that is monitoring your environment 24/7. The resources needed to maintain a SOC requires a completely different skill-set from a standard IT operations team. This is not a standard team of L1/L2 technicians, but rather a complement of very specialized, costly security talent. This puts a financial burden on organizations that try to staff a specialized team around the clock. A properly staffed SOC-as-a-service manages multiple clients and has the staff needed to accommodate the ebbs and flows of the work and is able to pass the cost savings on to their customers. 
Finding and Retaining Staff
Highly specialized employees are difficult to find and, perhaps, even harder to retain. Due to high demand, there is no guarantee that once they are hired they won’t have their heads turned by another organization. In fact, they’re quite prone to jumping ship, wanting new challenges offered by emerging technologies and new environments to monitor, and there are plenty of places that will hire them. These highly trained, highly educated staff have many options to leverage their skillset. With all that in mind, it makes SOC-as-a-service even more attractive, it creates a process that provides staff access to great training and visibility into multiple environments keeping them engaged. It also ensures that the staff will not be looking at the same challenges day in and day out which keeps them stimulated, as well as the pay being competitive.
Triage Alerts
Not all of the alerts your SOC receives are going to be legitimate. In fact, about 90% of them will be false positives. That might sound like a cause to celebrate, but there’s actually a reason to be concerned about this, too. Your IT specialists have a playbook for dealing with these alerts. They have steps they need to take, and they will take these steps to deal with the alert every single time it occurs; every, single, time. We already mentioned that IT specialists get bored in the same environment, so if you’re putting them through these same processes every time, only for it to be a false alarm, they’re going to get very tired of this very quickly. A SOC leverages automation that deals with false-positive alerts and leaves them free to deal with the higher-level threats keeping them focused.
With all of the potential financial risks involved, the time-consuming nature of recruitment, and the constant need to keep staff motivated— it’s easy to see why a lot of companies don’t use their own resources to secure their organization. It’s why more and more companies are outsourcing this responsibility. At TBConsulting we know what it takes to keep your organization secure. We have the technologies in place to efficiently run a Security Operations Center. We find and retain the highly specialized staff you need (saving you the time and money) and most importantly, keeping them onboard. Let TBConsulting keep your organization secure, while you focus on running a successful business.
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