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Why Businesses Should Consider Outsourcing Their Security Operations Center (SOC)

In this modern age, the Security Operation Center (SOC) has become an important consideration for organizations. Because it helps them to keep an eye on their systems and manage all the threats efficiently. A SOC serves as a security framework that does not let any third party(hacker) break in and access the crucial information of the businesses. SOCs are managed by cybersecurity analysts. 

It’s very expensive to build an in-house SOC for small organizations. Because they don’t have enough budget to hire a team of cybersecurity experts. It’s difficult for them to pay the extra salaries and for training. This is the main reason behind the popularity of the idea of outsourcing a company’s cybersecurity.

In this article, we will discuss the need to outsource the SOC and the SOC as a Service (SOCaaS) Benefits. Keep reading to learn more!

The Difficulties of Building Your Own SOC and Why Outsourcing Is The Solution:

Building an in-house SOC is not a big deal for large organizations. Most of the large organizations also benefit from using this approach. Because the large organization has time and a large budget to manage all the expenses. But for mid-tier and small organizations, it’s very difficult to build their own SOC as it looks very expensive to them.

You need to hire an experienced team of professionals and analysts to form your own SOC. Before building SOC, it’s necessary to know about its complexities and impact on security.

Let’s dive deeper to learn the five difficulties that a business may face while building a SOC and know why outsourcing is the best solution:

1. Complexity:

The creation of an in-house SOC with proper planning to have maximum security is a difficult task. If a business has many projects running at the same time and a lack of cyber experts, then it will become very challenging for them to manage the SOC. Without the expertise and experienced persons, it is not possible to build a SOC that can provide the expected security to the organization. Many other things need to be considered before making a SOC such as creating a budget and selecting the person who will oversee the SOC operations.

Outsourcing the SOC makes it easier to implement it. Using SOC as a service lets you have the services of skilled security analysts while configuring and maintaining a SEIM. Outsourcing saves you from the headache of finding skilled persons. 

2. Volume of Alerts:

A huge amount of log data is ingested from various sources to recognize suspicious and abnormal activities by the SIEM tools. Approximately 11,000 security alerts can be received in a day. It depends upon the environment, and size of the organization, etc.

Most of the time security teams are overwhelmed when they have to face too many security alerts. It mostly happens because of false positive alerts that can occur due to configuration issues, wrong utilization of resources, lack of skills and training or the tools lack automation. Keep in mind that if security alerts are missed or you don’t deal with them appropriately and timely they can expose your business to cyber-attacks. 

The organizations that outsource the SOC to MSSP don’t have to face all of that because they have the services of skilled teams that have the necessary tools to deal with security alerts. Outsourcing the SOC and using the SOC as a Service (SOCaaS) enhances peace of mind by providing efficient threat detection and response. 

3. Skill Shortage:

If you are going to build your own SOC, then you will face a shortage of skills. There is a great demand for security analysts, making it challenging to form in-house SOC. It’s not a good idea for mid-tier and small organizations to have a low-skill team and train them to become skilled. 

This means it is difficult to get high security from your own SOC. An outsourced SOC lets you access the teams of experts. This approach lowers the burden from your shoulders and provides a feeling of peace that your systems and data are protected and that you have a team of experts at the backend to deal with any kind of issue. 

4. Employee Burnout:

Running an in-house SOC is a very daunting task. The abnormal working hours and shift patterns exhaust the employees. There are four main reasons for that which are:

  • Increase workload
  • No visibility of business network traffic
  • Stay active on all the calls 24/7
  • A large number of security alerts

All of this makes it challenging to run in-house SOC. This can impact the security of the systems and the organizational data. But it can be overcome with the help of outsourced SOC. It can provide you with reliable threat protection 24/7. In an outsourced SOC, you don’t need to manage the team and create work schedules for them.

5. Costly and Time-Consuming:

Forming your SOC is not an easy task, it’s extremely expensive and requires a lot of your time. It can take up to 12 months or more than 12 to build a SOC. The maintenance of SOC is a labor-intensive task. Outsourcing SOC helps to cut down the cost. It saves you from hiring the staff and paying their salaries and training fees. No need to recruit staff, pay salaries, and spend on the training of the staff. Meanwhile, outsourcing provides you with a cost-effective solution.

Benefits of SOC as a Service:

  • Cost-Effective
  • Access to Technical Security Experts
  • Easy Scalability
  • 24/7 Monitoring
  • Reduced Operational Overhead
  • Access to Advanced Security Technologies

Final Words: 

Getting an outside company to handle your SOC lowers the load on your own team and security teams. It helps to bring in security upgrades that will not go out of your budget. For many companies, building their own SOC is too expensive. That’s where trusted security providers come in, they are experts at handling these security issues and can offer top-notch defense measures. Outsourcing means you will have a reliable SOC as a Service (SOCaaS) that gives your business the best security against cyber threats.