Building a strong SOC doesn’t happen overnight. It requires strategic planning, smart hiring, and a long-term vision. This is especially true when it comes to the bedrock of any successful SOC: its analysts. SOC managers play a crucial role in building, mentoring, and developing analysts to ensure the SOC is resilient and effective. If you’re a SOC manager, here are some strategies for building a strong SOC team.

Feeling overwhelmed by alerts? You’re not alone. At SOC Analyst Appreciation Day (SAAD) 2024, we heard from countless analysts facing the same challenges of burnout, perfectionism, and the need for mentorship. With a fantastic line-up of speakers, including John Hammond, Ron Eddings, Peter Coroneos from Cybermindz, and other security leaders, this year’s event provided valuable insights and sparked engaging discussions.

The SIEM market is in flux. Mergers, acquisitions, and vendors leaving the space are creating uncertainty for organizations that rely on SIEMs as the cornerstone of their security operations. If your organization is feeling the ripple effects of this consolidation, it’s time for a SIEM checkup. This means critically examining your current SIEM stack and vendor relationship to ensure they’re still serving your evolving security needs.

Cyberattacks by hacking groups using ransomware and other tactics dominate the headlines, but the risks posed by individuals within an organization can be just as, if not more, damaging. CISA defines an insider threat as the possibility that authorized personnel will use their access, either intentionally or unintentionally, to harm an organization’s mission, resources, information, systems, or other assets.

Our world is more digitally connected than ever, including the critical infrastructure systems we rely on: power grids, water treatment plants, transportation networks, communication systems, emergency services, and hospitals. A successful attack on critical infrastructure can have dire consequences, ranging from widespread power outages and contaminated water supplies to economic downturns and societal disruption. Some of those consequences have come to fruition in recent years.

An organization is only as secure as its weakest link — and the software supply chain is most often where the weakest link is found. A supply chain attack is a sophisticated cyberattack where malicious actors compromise a service provider to gain unauthorized access to its end users. Since 2018, the number of organizations impacted by supply chain attacks has increased by 2,600%.

Deploying a next-gen cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) in your security operations center (SOC) is a big step in the right direction toward significantly improving your organization’s security capabilities. But once you have that state-of-the-art SIEM in your SOC, how do you get the most out of it? One key step is building and executing specific SIEM use cases designed to meet the particular needs of your organization.

What you’re doing isn’t working. Despite best efforts, the scale of cybersecurity data is outpacing the ability of security information and event management (SIEM) solutions to identify and stay ahead of digital threats. Incremental improvements can’t keep pace with the scale of data contained in cloud solutions and the scope of data created by new tools, like generative AI. The result? It’s time for transformation—and time for SIEM to act like a security data platform.