In the business of security, linking performance metrics to strategy has become an accepted best practice. If strategy is the blueprint for building a security operations center (SOC), metrics are the raw materials. But there is a catch: a security organization can easily lose sight of its strategy and instead focus strictly on the metrics that are meant to represent it.
As revealed in the 2021 Devo SOC Performance ReportTM — which is based on the results of a survey of more than 1,000 security practitioners — organizations are frustrated with their SOC’s lack of effectiveness in performing its vital work. To combat the concerns the survey identified, it’s important for SOCs to refine how they operate.
There’s no question that centralized identity and access management (IAM) helps companies reduce risk and prevent attacks. But, as this week’s Okta attack shows, centralized IAM doesn’t eliminate all risks. Attackers with access to IAM data can use this information to easily access downstream systems or modify permissions to grant elevated access to malicious parties.
Just a few years ago, security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) was the new buzzword associated with security modernization. Today, however, SOAR platforms are increasingly assuming a legacy look and feel. Although SOARs still have their place in a modern SecOps strategy, the key to driving SecOps forward today is no-code security automation.
Security operation teams continuously aim to focus on two main things: 1. Real cyber security threats (also known as “True Positive Alerts”), and 2. Reducing response time, especially when you have so many different sources to monitor. However, in reality, we deal with hundreds of security alerts on a daily basis, many of which are false positives that waste our valuable time. This is where incident response/security automation becomes a requirement rather than nice to have.
Building an in-house security operations center represents a significant commitment, both financially and strategically, to securing your enterprise. According to the 2021 Devo SOC Performance ReportTM — which is based on the results of a survey of more than 1,000 security practitioners — 73% of respondents said their SOC was “very important” or “essential” to their organization’s overall cybersecurity strategy.
