SOC Team Roles and Responsibilities – How SOC Team Structure Looks like
Vimal Mohan
Oct 17, 2024
Security teams are racing to fix every new vulnerability detected in their ever-evolving and ever-expanding technology infrastructure landscape. As a result, the responsibility of maintaining a holistic security posture is assigned to the Security Operations Center (SOC) team.
At a high level, a SOC team looks after maintaining their security monitoring tools and investigates suspicious activities that get flagged in the organization’s business environment.
Often the entire bandwidth of the cybersecurity team is deployed to firefighting, often, many new and existing vulnerabilities that get flagged take time to tend to.
Hackers and bad actors exploit these vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access to critical systems. These security incidents impact organizations in the form of loss of brand value, financial loss, data loss, and more.
Is there a way to make things better?
Yes!
But, before we get to the resolution, we must understand what SOC roles and responsibilities are and the types of organizations that usually have a SOC team to map the relationship between the organization and their security teams.
This map is designed to help organizations understand the quick fixes and new initiatives they can implement to increase efficiency.
What is SOC?
SOC or Security Operations Centre is a team of cybersecurity experts that act as the command center for protecting an organization’s assets, infrastructure, and information. They monitor, detect, analyze, and respond to incidents across the IT infrastructure.
In today’s digital landscape, a SOC is crucial for protecting an organization’s data, systems, and reputation from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. The effectiveness of a SOC can significantly impact an organization’s ability to prevent, detect, and respond to security incidents.
What does a SOC team do?
A SOC team is often tasked with many security-related activities. This could range from conducting training sessions to educate their employees on the latest security breaches and the best practices to prevent an occurrence of that nature to actively monitoring their security posture to prevent security incidents.
On a high level, the SOC team is responsible for maintaining their security monitoring tools and investigating suspicious activities that get flagged in the organization’s business environment.
1. Maintaining Security Monitoring Tools
SOC teams rely on security tools to monitor their organization’s business infrastructure across cloud and on-prem assets. The SOC team reviews the security logs from these tools through a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) tool to get insights on any new vulnerability(s) that arise.
Their chain’s weakened links (vulnerabilities) are fixed to restore their security posture to desired efficiency levels.
2. Investigates Suspicious Activities
The SOC team relies on security monitoring tools and SIEM platforms to monitor their business environment for malicious activity. If malicious activity is flagged, the team investigates the activity.
If the activity poses a security threat, the threat is neutralized, and the learnings are shared with the team to spread awareness of the current security threats and best practices.
These investigations are often successful when the team has experienced security experts leading the studies and is provided with the latest tools to get ahead of the threat.
What are the SOC team Roles and Responsibilities?
SOC teams are responsible for maintaining security monitoring tools and investigating suspicious activities. Here are other activities in which SOC teams are usually involved:
- Determining False Positives:
SOC teams are flooded with possible instances of suspicious activities, and most of them are false positives. The SOC team is responsible for identifying the real threats from the false positives and assigning remedial actions based on the severity of the threat. Assigning severity ensures that the organization’s resources are used efficiently and that the team is not sent to deploy patches for minor vulnerabilities that pose no threat to data or critical systems.
- Incident response:
Responding to security vulnerabilities before hackers breach them is the responsibility of the SOC team.
- Implementing newer control mechanisms:
The threat landscape is constantly evolving and the responsibility to upgrade the organization’s infrastructure to detect the latest penetration methods and threats is assigned to the SOC team.
- IT tasks:
Sometimes the SOC team is called upon to help solve IT tickets of their internal customers (employees).
Also check out: How to automate SOC 2
What type of organizations are recommended to have SOC teams?
Hiring and maintaining a good SOC team structure is expensive. Should your organization take up such an expense right now? While there is no black-and-white answer to that question, here are a few pointers to help you decide. Your organization should build a SOC team if:
| Level 1 | Initial Phase of Security |
| Level 2 | Developing business process |
| Level 3 | Defined |
| Level 4 | Managed |
| Level 5 | Optimizing for Scale |
* You should also consider getting a SOC team if your organization deals with payment card information and is required to be PCI DSS compliant for its processing activities.
* Your organization stores or processes extremely sensitive data. The need is now.
* Your Organization has been a victim of a security breach or a security incident recently.
* If you are an organization that is a Fortune 500 company looking to scale. Your business development and threat management assessment highlight the need for one or more SOC teams.
Also read: SOC 2 guide for startups
Top 4 tips to have the best SOC team
Four effective tips to build the best SOC team are:
1. Encourage continuous learning: Companies with security certifications experience 53% fewer security incidents, according to a Cybrary report. Set up regular internal workshops and get your team to security conferences.
2. Document details of incidents: When a breach hits, every second counts. So, create detailed playbooks for different scenarios and make sure everyone knows their role inside out. Run regular drills. Companies that test their incident response plans save a lot in breach costs, according to IBM.
3. Embrace automation: Implement a solid SIEM system and leverage machine learning for threat detection. However, tools are only as good as the people using them. Use automation to free up your team for the complex, creative problem-solving that machines can’t match.
4. Break down silos: Build strong relationships across your organization – IT, development, business units, the works. Regular communication with leadership is key for high levels of cyber maturity.
Conclusion
Security operations center teams are expensive, and the SOC roles and responsibilities often get assigned to a CTO or a CISO, depending on the size and maturity of the organization. SMBs and startups need help allocating funds to deploy expensive security tools to gain visibility on their security posture. The lack of visibility often is the root cause of their security incidents.
Sprinto enables a layer of visibility by enabling organizations to monitor their security posture by mapping applicable activities to compliance. In addition, our automated tools help organizations identify areas not aligned with the compliance standards and immediately deploy remediation methods.
Sprinto automatically grades the instance based on the severity to ensure that your organization addresses the tasks that need immediate attention.
Contact us for more details on how you can enable this layer of visibility in your organization while becoming compliant with security and privacy frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, CCPA, GDPR, and 15 others.
FAQs
How many people are on a SOC team?
A SOC team generally consists of a Security Analyst, Security Engineer, Security Manager, and CISO (Chief Information Security Officer).
What should be the SOC team structure?
A SOC team structure should be headed by a CISO or a Director of Security. Their job would be to implement the overall security strategy. The analysts, engineers, and managers report to the head of security to implement the strategy.
What is a SOC role?
A SOC role is a position within a Security Operations Center team. These roles are crucial for maintaining an organization’s cybersecurity posture. Typical SOC roles include Security Analysts who monitor and investigate alerts and Incident Responders who handle active security breaches.
What is a SOC management team?
The SOC management team is responsible for the overall direction and performance of the Security Operations Center. This team typically includes roles like SOC Director, Senior Security Manager, and Team Leads. They handle strategic planning, resource allocation, and team leadership.
What is a SOC tool?
SOC tools are technological solutions used by security teams to detect, analyze, and respond to cybersecurity threats. Key examples include SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems for log collection and analysis, EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) for monitoring endpoint devices, and SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response) platforms for automating security workflows.
