SecOps today: Removing Silos, Bridging Gaps

Security and Operations have long worked as distinct functions with information silos, only to implement reactive measures at the time of the incident and create an environment of finger-pointing. However, the gradual convergence of Security Operations (SecOps) has been driven by the need for proactive risk management and a growing awareness of the shared objectives in data protection.

Yet, this is only the beginning of the change. The differing priorities of these functions and the lack of a unified perspective continue to create friction. Nevertheless, integrating security into every operational facet is the only way forward. 

This blog talks about everything SecOps—the working, implementation, best practices and benefits and challenges. Read on to get a full-fledged view of the approach.

What is Security Operations?

Security Operations (SecOps) is the integration of information security and IT operations to protect critical assets, minimize risks, and ensure business continuity. This collaboration makes it easier to monitor and respond to threats, implement security controls, and maintain a secure environment.

Importance of Security Operations

SecOps is crucial for minimizing silos between the operations and development teams. It helps shift security left by integrating it into processes from the start, minimizing vulnerabilities at the production stage. The integration also ensures that no unstable updates are released, and in the event of an incident, a coordinated response is launched, leading to faster recovery times. SecOps is also responsible for delivery timelines, application uptime and security requirements.

Here’s an example to explain the importance of SecOps–, if the organization faces a cloud incident, SecOps integration significantly reduces the damage. Security tools such as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) continuously monitor traffic and raise alerts in case of suspicious activity. There is no waiting for operations to investigate the matter separately, as both teams collaborate to analyze the threat. This enables quick blocking of suspicious IPs, efficient patch management, and thorough incident documentation.

Therefore, SecOps integration is essential for building a resilient organization and staying agile in a fast-paced threat environment.

How does SecOps work?

SecOps creates a collaborative framework to integrate security measures into the core operations to manage risks seamlessly. Here is how SecOps typically works:

Continuous monitoring

The SecOps teams set up continuous monitoring across networks, devices, endpoints, cloud environments, and application behavior. These tools may also use machine learning and data analytics to track and identify malicious behavior, data exfiltration, unauthorized access attempts, and performance discrepancies. Automated alerts are generated in case of deviations to prompt the teams to enable action.

Communication and collaboration

SecOps facilitates communication and collaboration through centralization. A unified platform such as an SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system or centralized dashboards from tools like Sprinto becomes a single source of truth for the teams. This ensures real-time visibility across teams, and automated alerts are routed through the same communication channel. It helps with streamlined responses and standardized processes.

Threat intelligence

The security and operations teams work to integrate threat intelligence feeds into security systems for up-to-date information on threats. This integration helps with better data correlation and adds more context to alerts, thereby reducing false positives. It also enables proactive hunting for indicators of compromise and better incident preparedness.

Incident response

The Security Operations Center (SOC) acts as a command hub for SecOps and incident response teams at the time of an incident. The security and operations team helps with initial triage and investigation. This is followed by implementing containment measures and eradicating the root cause. The teams also collaborate for recovery and restoration operations to ensure business as usual.

Automating security and compliance tasks

SecOps also collaborates to automate a range of security and compliance tasks. They set up ongoing monitoring, compliance checks, automated patch deployment, and incident response playbooks. These efforts enhance the efficiency of security measures, minimize human errors, and free up valuable resources for mission-critical tasks.

Forensics and root cause analysis

SecOps teams preserve evidence after an incident to conduct a root cause analysis. They investigate how the attacker gained access and exploited vulnerabilities by analyzing logs, network traffic, and systems. Various techniques and tools are leveraged to understand the attack patterns and identified loopholes are addressed to enhance the security posture.

How to implement security operations?

Implementing SecOps requires people with the right skills, streamlined and unified processes and a set of tools and technologies to equip the teams with the right information.

Here’s how you can implement SecOps:

Assess your cyber readiness to define goals

Evaluate your current security practices to identify where your gaps lie—do you have outdated software, weak incident response capabilities, unmet compliance requirements, or poorly matched tech and tasks? This analysis will require in-depth risk assessments, discussions with cross-functional leaders and observation but it’ll form the foundation of the SecOps strategy.

Use industry benchmarks such as NIST for cybersecurity practices to define your ideal state and set goals accordingly. Additionally, when building your collaborative team, ensure that it has a range of specialists in IT, risk management and security.

Deploy tools for SecOps

SecOps implementation requires you to deploy a set of tools for enhanced visibility, threat detection, quick response and process improvement. These tools include:

• Security Information and Event Management (SIEM): A centralized security tool to collect data from various sources and enable event correlation.
• Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR): A tool for building repeatable workflows and automating processes
• GRC tools: Comprehensive tools to centralize risk management, ensure good governance and stay on top of compliance.
• Endpoint detection tools: Tools to monitor endpoint activities and detect threats in real-time
• Vulnerability scanning tools: Tools to scan networks for weaknesses that can be exploited
• Incident response tools: Tools that enable incident alerts, triage and response

Implement continuous monitoring

The collaboration between security and operations thrives on continuous monitoring and real-time insights. Establish an ongoing monitoring system that ensures there are no blind spots or sharp corners to navigate, whether in cloud environments or on-premise. Integrate threat intelligence and leverage behavior analytics tools to understand attacker behavior and tactics. Use real-time dashboards to provide visibility into your current security posture and stay ahead of weaknesses.

Sprinto helps granularly monitor threats and control performance in real-time assets. See for yourself:

Create incident response plans

SecOps teams are responsible for establishing a formal incident response plan and coordinating with the Security Operations Center (SOC) during incidents. This includes managing the entire process, from initial triage to recovery and response. SecOps must clearly define roles, responsibilities, and communication protocols, ensuring access to the necessary resources and tools. After an incident, SecOps should conduct a post-incident review and submit reports to stakeholders, identifying areas for improvement.

Arrange security awareness training

SecOps implementation requires a wide range of training and awareness programs that equip the teams with the right knowledge and skills. This includes:

• Security awareness training at an organizational level: This general training will educate the organization, including the SecOps function, about cyber hygiene practices, phishing scams, and attacker tactics.
• Incident response training: The program will train SecOps on how to detect and respond to incidents under stress situations
• Training on SecOps tools: This training will enable them to leverage the tools deployed and make well-informed decisions
• Compliance training: Compliance training will equip them with the right knowledge on applicable frameworks such as ISO 27001, SOC 2 etc.
• Cloud security training: Cloud security training will enable them to uphold best security practices in the cloud and apply the right measures such as encryption, network segmentation and access controls.

Conduct regular reviews

The SecOps team must be agile and adaptable, requiring systematic reviews to ensure that security measures function as intended. These security reviews include policy alignment, security control testing, metrics tracking, and assessing emerging threats. The insights gained help improve processes and strengthen security measures, creating a more resilient environment.

Security operations best practices

Adopting SecOps best practices can minimize the friction points between the teams and create a more collaborative environment while enhancing the effectiveness of the SecOps strategy.

Here are five best practices for SecOps that you must implement:

Red team vs. blue team exercises

Red team and blue team exercises are popular in cybersecurity to uncover security gaps and enhance security maturity. Red teams use tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) to simulate real-world attacks, while blue teams act as defenders to respond to threats. Post-exercise, both teams discuss and document findings and areas of improvement.

Implement a zero-trust architecture

A Zero-Trust Architecture is based on the principle of “never trust, always verify” and is crucial for SecOps’s success. It emphasizes continuous authentication and authorization of access, network segmentation, and ongoing user behavior monitoring. These practices work together to minimize the attack surface and safeguard sensitive information.

Equip the teams with the right tools for better visibility

SecOps teams today are tasked with ensuring better business outcomes while maintaining positive security metrics. To achieve this, extended visibility across endpoints, networks, user behavior, and third-party vendors is crucial. This visibility helps minimize their stress and equips them with the information needed to make informed decisions.

Automate repeatable processes

Some repetitive tasks SecOps teams are equipped with include incident triage, log retrieving, looking up IP addresses and posting messages on slack and emails about incident alerts. It only makes sense to automate these repeatable workflows including alert handling, compliance monitoring, automated vulnerability scans, threat intelligence integration and automated notifications with contextual alerts. Automation helps ensure encumbered scalability along with faster and more consistent responses.

Ensure end-to-end security in the development pipeline

Apply secure design principles and ensure the effectiveness of controls throughout the lifecycle of an application. This includes secure coding practices, testing vulnerabilities in CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment) pipelines, monitoring application performance and managing configurations effectively.

Benefits and Challenges of SecOps

The SecOps convergence is a necessity rather than an option in the current times. Nevertheless, it comes with its benefits and challenges.

Benefits

Let’s start with the benefits of SecOps:

Quicker incident resolution

Security and operations integration leads to fewer operational complexities and standardized processes. This helps reduce the Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) and results in proactive risk mitigation. The teams benefit from centralized visibility and enhanced collaboration, ultimately improving the organization’s incident preparedness.

Reduced security disruptions

SecOps ensures that security and operations teams collaborate effectively to maintain application uptime and continuously monitor the security environment. This integration reduces threats, minimizes distractions, and decreases downtime while streamlining threat response. In a traditional setup, where security and operations functions operate in silos, the process can be prolonged due to a lack of context and differing priorities.

Resilience and continuity

SecOps integration provides a unified approach to incident response, with both teams leveraging insights from centralized data, contributing to business continuity plans, conducting regular assessments, and maintaining compliance. It fosters a security-conscious culture within the organization and, over time, enhances overall resilience

Enhanced compliance management

A security-first culture helps comply with various compliance frameworks by default. It also supports automated compliance checks, thorough documentation procedures, regular risk assessments, and internal audits. These activities provide better visibility into compliance issues and progress and make meeting regulatory requirements easier for the organization.

Challenges

Here are four SecOps challenges organizations repeatedly face:

Alert fatigue

SecOps teams often become overwhelmed by the volume of security alerts from tools and monitoring systems. The problem is accentuated when many of these are false positives or lack context. This can desensitize the team and lead to overlooking critical alerts.

Invest in intelligent alerting systems that add contextual information and minimize false positives to mitigate alert fatigue. Additionally, regularly review and update alerting rules to enhance the efficiency of alerts.

Fading boundaries

While traditional on-premise systems had clear physical perimeters, modern infrastructures have blurred those boundaries. Dynamic and hybrid cloud environments introduce unique security challenges for each component, with different platforms requiring distinct security measures. This makes consistent protection difficult to achieve.

To address this, your organization needs unified security tools capable of continuously monitoring the dynamic environment and initiating rapid responses.

Staff shortage and increasing process complexity

According to a report by Command Zero, 88% of respondents are concerned about operational issues and the lack of skilled staff. Additionally, 74% of respondents admitted that SecOps teams lack the talent to manage cloud environments. On the other hand, the complexity of SecOps tools and processes, due to the integration of various infrastructure elements, affects incident investigations and documentation. This complexity can lead to less accurate decision-making and burnout among team members.

Organizations must invest in training, leverage automation, and standardize processes to solve this challenge. Recruitment processes must also be enhanced to attract the right talent.

Remote work challenges

Remote work has expanded the attack surface area by providing attackers with more endpoints and network opportunities. There’s reduced behavior visibility and increased complexity in solving incidents. It has also increased dependence on cloud applications, bringing cloud security challenges.

Use advanced MDM tools such as Dr Sprinto to secure endpoint devices and enforce access controls to manage remote access.

Minimize input, maximize output for SecOps with Sprinto

The integration of security with operations has been around for some time, yet many organizations struggle to manage it smoothly. For teams, it becomes challenging to maintain security standards, meet compliance requirements, and still align with broader business objectives. This is where automation steps in to simplify processes and lighten the load. Enter Sprinto.

As a next-gen GRC tool, Sprinto automates repetitive workflows while providing centralized, real-time visibility. Continuous control monitoring and compliance checks ensure that your security controls function as intended, while automated, context-driven alerts enable proactive action in the event of any deviation. With automated control mapping, integrated risk management, policy enforcement, security training modules, and a host of other features. It becomes a crucial asset for SecOps team as it puts compliance on auto-pilot, continuously collecting evidence, and freeing up secops bandwidth to focus on maturing their security practices.

Take a platform tour and streamline your SecOps journey with Sprinto.

FAQs

What are cyber security operations?

Cyber security operations are a coordinated set of activities by the information security and IT departments to secure data and critical assets. Strategies covered in cyber security operations include continuous monitoring, threat detection, incident response, and security policy enforcement.

What is the difference between SecOps and DevOps?

SecOps focus on integrating security measures into IT operations to minimize risks and maintain business continuity. DevOps, on the other hand combines development and operations to ensure faster application releases. So while the goal of SecOps is to protect against threats, DevOps helps to speed up the development cycle.

What is the difference between SOC and SecOps?

A Security Operations Center (SOC) is a physical or virtual facility focused on incident management and response. Security Operations, or SecOps, is a subset of this centralized unit that aligns security processes with operations and minimizes risks across the IT environment.

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