Why Your MSP Needs SOC-as-a-Service

Each day cyberattacks grow and get more sophisticated, yet innovations around cybersecurity rarely keep pace. This has left MSPs in a strangely powerful position: robust cybersecurity to protect customers is no longer an extra, it’s a must-have. When 62% of small businesses claim that they lack the skills in-house to be able to properly deal with security issues, this is a ripe revenue opportunity for savvy MSPs. As you develop your cybersecurity offering, you’re probably already thinking about layers like network boundary protection, email security protection, and endpoint protection. However, if you want to rapidly detect and respond to advanced threats before they do harm, you’ll want to add SOC-as-a-service to your arsenal. We’ll show you why and how.

The ingredients for a Security Operations Center (SOC)

There are three important elements of a SOC: people, process, and technology.

Here’s who is in the SOC: teams of security analysts, threat intelligence experts, and supporting technology administrators. They provide services including 24/7 monitoring, alert triage, threat hunting, anomaly detection, and incident response. When considering threat intelligence, a SOC not only identifies and remediates known threats, but also analyzes data to identify new threats along with corresponding alerting and prevention techniques. This is way beyond what machine analysis alone can do, and the human cybersecurity expertise is out of scope of most IT teams.

It’s not just about the human talent. The people without the process leaves room for detrimental error and inefficiencies. A SOC must have a tried, true, consistent, and resilient method by which it conducts its security operations. At a very high level this process includes incident triage, incident reporting, incident analysis, incident closure, post-incident activities, vulnerability discovery, and vulnerability remediation. Based on the type of security event, incident, and/or vulnerability each of these process steps may include a variety of playbooks that provide insight on how the incident should be handled from start to finish.