How Small and Midsized Businesses Benefit from a Security Operations Center (SOC)

The 24/7 security monitoring a SOC provides is critical to optimal security, here’s the how and why of choosing a good SOC partner.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold, strong security has become an area of great interest for businesses, especially those who are embracing work from home arrangements. Remote staff depend on computers and related technologies to stay productive, but we’ve seen businesses in a wide variety of industries overlook important cybersecurity issues, and sometimes even create new vulnerabilities in the rush to deploy work from home systems.

While securing your remote desktop protocol (RDP) solution, updating productivity software, and deploying firewalls are all important steps, they’re not enough to provide the highest level of security. To achieve that level of confidence and stability, you’ll need the protection a security operations center (SOC) provides.

What is a Security Operations Center and How Does it Keep My Business Safe?

SOCs provide businesses with a team of cybersecurity defenders who work from a specialized facility to monitor and analyze their client’s technology and network for threats.

Much like a managed IT service provider, SOC solutions provide a reliable, flat-rate way for a business to access expertise and resources that would normally be very difficult to acquire in-house.

There are several ways that a small or midsized business benefits from working with a SOC provider

Continuous 24/7 Monitoring

Not only will have a SOC team help you locate weaknesses in your company’s infrastructure, but they also provide comprehensive monitoring of all your technology, including the flow of traffic in and out of your network to locate security threats in real-time.

Why do you need 24/7 monitoring, and not just when your staff is at work? Much of the malicious and damaging activity occurs outside normal work hours. Hackers from a foreign country, for example, may exploit global time differences to infiltrate a company, do damage, and cover their tracks while the victim’s IT staff is at home in bed. Having a reliable SOC in your corner addresses this issue.

The Latest Security Tools

With their finger on the pulse of the ever-changing threat landscape, the analysts and engineers at a SOC are deeply acquainted with the intelligence and defensive software. They’ll bring those tools to bear to protect your business, giving you dependable, cutting edge security without having to choose, purchase, and learn how to use those tools on your own.

A reputable SOC will integrate all the latest platforms into a seamless, accessible solution

• Security information and event management (SIEM)
• User and event behavioral (UEBA)
• Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR)

Build Greater Confidence with Your Insurers

Insurance companies have started to signal increased concern about client security in the age of work from home. Even if your company has purchased cybersecurity insurance, there are often significant gaps in those policies around ransomware or other emergent threats.

Partnering with a SOC can help allay the concerns of your insurers and demonstrate a commitment to cybersecurity preparedness that helps build greater confidence and could lead to lowered insurance premiums.

Gain Increased Client Trust and Reputation

Cybersecurity is on every business leader’s mind, and work from home arrangements have made it an even higher priority. According to cybersecurity company Check Point, there were more than 18 million Covid-19 related scams sent from Gmail alone by mid-April. There’s no reason to expect the total number of attacks to go down any time soon.

Working with a SOC demonstrates a high level of commitment to security and allows prospects to confidently do business with your company, while giving existing clients a greater assurance that their data is safe, which positions you as a trustworthy, long-term partner that can help them weather the crisis.

It’s important to mention that not all SOCs are built the same, nor will they provide the maximum benefit as a standalone service. At Complete Network, for example, our vCIOs work as an intermediary between the client and our SOC team, guiding the overall security strategy and ensuring that unique vulnerabilities are receiving optimal protection.

What is “Dwell Time” and How Can A SOC Team Help You Reduce It?

The importance of a SOC is especially important in relation to a cybersecurity term, dwell time, which means the amount of time it takes your business to discover that someone has infiltrated your network.

Most business owners are shocked to learn the following statistics:

• The average time a hacker has access to a company’s data before getting detected is around 55 days, though some research shows it could be as high as 70 days. ^[1]
• The average dwell time of a persistent malware infection is 798 days, while the average for so-called riskware — like web trackers and adware — is 869 days. ^[2]

Until they’re detected, a hacker could have complete access to your systems, which means the ability to exfiltrate valuable data, plant malware, and view sensitive company information. A SOC is one of the most effective tools for helping you reduce the dwell time of a cyberattack, ensuring cyber threats are identified and responded to quickly and efficiently.

A high-quality SOC will have a documented process for helping you quickly remediate threats

• Cybersecurity logging and analysis to identify anomalous events
• Reviewing alerts and escalating urgent incidents to priority status
• Collect data to eliminate false positives
• Employ threat intelligence to identify affected systems and attack scope
• Remediate the attack and optimize security monitoring tools

What Kind of Business Will Benefit from a Quality SOC Solution?

As we’ve discussed in the past, small and midsized businesses in every industry have become a top target for cybercriminals. Recent statistics show that over 76% have already dealt with a cyberattack, while the total number of attacks continues to increase annually. ^[3]

As enterprises continue to allocate ever-larger security budgets, and absorb much of the top-quality cybersecurity talent, small and business will rely on SOC services to help them counter those threats.

The Importance of SOC Services to Regulated Industries
Companies in industries with strong regulatory compliance requirements derive particular benefit from SOC service. After the Complete Network vCIO team has designed and implement a regulatory compliance strategy for your business, we can then provide a SOC solution to vigorously monitor personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data, ensuring all compliance controls are enforced over the long term.

Our SOC team performs regular audits of its own internal processes to ensure they’re compliant with all major regulations.

• HIPAA/HiTECH
• PCI-DSS
• NYS-DFS
• FINRA/SEC

Complete Network – Two Decades of Cybersecurity Monitoring and Vigilance

For over 20 years, Complete Network has been providing businesses in Albany, New York and Charlotte, North Carolina with cybersecurity expertise that maximizes defensive capabilities and minimizes the damage of cyberattacks.

If you’d like to learn more about how a world-class security operation center (SOC) solution can help safeguard your business against attacks and regulatory compliance lapses, feel free to contact our team at any time at (844) 426-7844. We’re always happy to answer your questions!

[1] https://www.trustwave.com/en-us/resources/blogs/spiderlabs-blog/announcing-the-2019-trustwave-global-security-report/

[2] https://www.infocyte.com/resources/mid-market-threat-and-incident-response-report/

[3] https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/cyber-attacks-on-smbs-are-once-again-on-the-rise-according-to-new-ponemon-report/