An effective SOC minimizes cybersecurity risks and reduces the likelihood of a data breach. It is an essential tool for any organization subject to government and industry regulations or with an extensive network of endpoints, servers, and perimeter devices.
Preventative maintenance includes applying software patches, updating firewalls, and maintaining safelists and denylists. Making backup policies and processes is also necessary for a ransomware attack or data breach.
Preventative Maintenance
Preventative maintenance is a proactive approach to asset maintenance that reduces the likelihood of failure. It involves inspections, tests, and other activities during an asset’s normal operating cycle. It can be viewed as an added cost but is a far more efficient and effective way to maintain equipment than reacting to breakdowns.
It reduces equipment downtime and increases productivity. Often, it enables technicians to fix minor issues before they become more significant problems. For example, something as simple as a tire just 10 pounds under-inflated can negatively affect fuel mileage by up to one percent. Proper preventive maintenance can improve equipment reliability, increase lifespan, and improve resale value.
However, preventive maintenance is not foolproof. In some cases, it can be counterproductive. For instance, replacing components or machines may be a waste of time and resources due to a breakdown anyway. It is especially true if the new replacement will not address any unexpected failures or improve performance.
To be effective, preventive maintenance requires a lot of planning and tracking data. It is incredibly challenging for organizations just starting and needing the benefit of existing statistics and records. Fortunately, CMMS software can make this process much less time-consuming and labor-intensive.
Incident Response
What is SOC, or System on Chip, and what does it do?SOCs are entrusted with defending an organization against cyberattacks and data breaches that could significantly harm business operations. It necessitates constant, round-the-clock IT system and network monitoring and swift response to potential security incidents.
To prioritize responses, SOC analysts must correlate and validate alerts, discarding false positives and assessing how serious any actual threats are. They are also responsible for collaborating with functional and business stakeholders to communicate severe threats as they occur.
Once they have confirmed a threat, SOC analysts mitigate its impact and recover the affected infrastructure. It can include restoring service on a network, isolating compromised endpoints, decommissioning passwords, terminating harmful processes, and more. These actions should affect the overall system performance as little as possible to protect the organization’s valuable information and avoid costly business disruptions.
To improve the SOC’s incident response capabilities, organizations can implement tools like centralized and actionable dashboards that provide visibility into all systems and domains. It can help SOC teams spot trends in adversaries’ tactics, techniques, and procedures to anticipate vulnerabilities before they occur. It can also help them automate tedious, time-consuming, and prone-to-error manual tasks, allowing security analysts to spend more of their day deploying their specialized skills.
Continuous Monitoring
SOC team members monitor an organization’s network and all connected devices for suspicious activity. They collect data from various sources, including external intelligence systems that deliver threat feeds, signature updates, and incident reports. They then analyze this information to identify and manage existing threats while also identifying emerging risks.
They must be ready to react to any threat that might emerge and need a centralized view of the entire infrastructure from a security perspective. It can only be accomplished with a security operations center incorporating SIEM, a vulnerability assessment solution, and IT governance, risk, and compliance tools.
Continuous monitoring requires SOC staff to have various skills, including networking, systems administration, database management and programming, cybersecurity, digital forensics, and IT governance. These professionals must be able to interpret and evaluate large amounts of data from multiple systems and applications and detect anomalies.
A SOC is a complex project, and it takes significant financial resources to build a fully-staffed in-house SOC that operates 24/7. For some organizations, a better solution may be integrating SOC functionality into their NOC or outsourcing some security capabilities. A careful cost-benefit analysis is required to determine the right mix of in-house and third-party solutions that meet an organization’s needs. Sometimes, the NOC and SOC can collaborate to work through significant incidents and resolve crises.
Compliance
Having a SOC minimizes the risk of a data breach, which could otherwise cost an organization a lot of money. Violations can result in revenue loss and damage a company’s reputation. Many experts agree that a SOC is worth the investment, particularly for organizations that must comply with consumer or customer privacy regulations.
SOC teams use security analytics solutions like a security information and event management (SIEM) answer or solution for security orchestration, automation, and response to monitoring the network—on-premises, cloud, and devices—all day and all night, looking for abnormalities that indicate attacks are occurring. SOC teams also utilize external feeds, and product threat reports to gain insight into attacker behavior, infrastructure, and motives.
When anomalies are detected, the SOC team takes action. It could include shutting down or isolating an affected endpoint, terminating harmful processes, deleting files, etc. The goal is to respond as quickly as possible to contain and neutralize the attack and limit the damage done to the business.
The SOC must have access to the most critical tools available and be staffed around the clock for this success. A thorough risk assessment is the first step in identifying which assets require the most protection and the best method—in-house resources or outside assistance. A SOC strategy defines the staffing needs and costs to ensure a team is available around the clock.
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